[Wikimedia-l] BBC Open Content

[Tom Morris]

On Tuesday, 10 April 2012 at 17:33, David Gerard wrote:
> This sounds like a licence that deserves to die a death.




Disagree. The point of the NC and ND licenses isn't so much so they can be used on Wikipedia but really as a stepping stone into CC for nervous types.

You might license something under CC BY-NC and watch it be reused a bit: someone pops it into a blog post or into a PowerPoint deck. And, holy crap, the world doesn't end, all is fine and nobody is being asked difficult questions about evil Communist freedom-haters who want to destroy Western civilisation. All is swell.

That's a pretty good practical argument when the Wikipedians turn up and start banging on about free licenses. Don't compromise on that: we should be stringent about PD, CC BY and BY SA only (although, incidentally, if we are to have non-free content, I'd rather have a CC BY NC licensed image than an all rights reserved image if possible, so long as it doesn't affect the number of contributed free images we have).

But let's not call for licenses to die or be killed: they serve an important role in allowing the cautious to get their toes wet.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>