[Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

[Tom Morris]

On 28 May 2012 22:37, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'd love to see -NC and -ND dropped from the CC catalog, but I doubt
> its going to happen.
>
> It would be nice if -NC and -ND had a time limit on them, after which
> the work becomes CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.
>

Although NC and ND cause pain for Wikipedians and Commonists and so
on, I'd actually not be a big fan of getting rid of them.

NC and ND give people a chance to dip their toe into free culture
licensing. Then upon finding that their leg hasn't been bitten off by
ravenous sharks and that actually mostly everything is fine, we can
come along and nudge them into upgrading.

See, for instance, the UK government: many government departments
published images under NC/ND. And then when nobody got fired for it,
they pass the Open Government License, which is a free content license
very much like CC BY.*

The question is: does NC/ND give people an excuse not to go for a
freer license, or does it give them a stepping stone towards freer
license from no licensing? It'd be nice if we could have some evidence
on this rather than anecdote trading. ;-)

NC and ND do have some uses. For instance, the very common use case of
publishing an academic paper. Yes, CC BY would be better. But BY-ND is
still pretty useful for the most common use case for a lot of academic
papers, namely photocopying a paper for a whole class of students...

(Plus getting rid of NC and ND won't mean that people won't stop
licensing works under NC/ND. There's a huge load of NC/ND work out
there already.)

* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OGL

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