[cc-community] What does NC means?
Giorgos Cheliotis
giorgos at smu.edu.sg
Sun Sep 16 04:43:08 EDT 2007
Although I understand that the definition of NC can be tricky, I don't see why there is strong resentment for NC licenses on the part of some of us in the community. Like it or not, there are many people out there who are keen to allow for free sharing, distribution and possibly also remixing of their work, as long as it is not commercial in nature.
By choosing for example a BY-NC-ND license, an author makes the important step of legitimizing file-sharing of his/her work, as the license at the very least allows for non-commercial sharing. Sure, many will share works anyhow, irrespective of the licensing, and will wrongly call it "fair use", or will argue that some forms of "piracy" are beneficial, but the important difference is that when an author voluntarily chooses a BY-NC-ND license, you can share that work all you want, *legally*. If every work in the world currently under full copyright restrictions would be licensed instead under BY-NC-ND (unlikely, but just for the sake of argument) we would have effectively legitimized file-sharing. Wouldn't that be some form of progress towards a more free culture?
Also, on whether SA is all you need: Larry has explained a few times that NC is not so much needed for software, and is therefore not used by FSF, because using software for commercial projects will usually entail some form of adaptation/derivation, so the SA constraint is enough to keep software free. But, unlike OSS, cultural works can have significant value as stand-alone products and thus are not sufficiently protected with SA (it is my understanding that the SA constraint only kicks in when a derivative work is produced, to dictate how that derivative should be licensed, so it does not protect the original work in its original form).
If we remove NC from the licenses we will effectively shut the doors of CC to a huge number of authors who are prepared to give their audience some freedom, but wish to preserve some avenues of commercial exploitation for themselves. That would be a mistake and probably lead to the marginalization of the movement. If, on the other hand, the main problem is that NC is not defined clearly enough, then the lawyers among us can help by defining it better in future versions of the licenses. Lastly, I do agree that probably some of the authors who choose NC or ND constraints do so for the wrong reasons. Then those who know better or think they know better will have to work towards convincing the rest that they should adopt another license, but they will have to do it one person at a time. Trying to force them into more liberal licensing by removing the most popular license types from the CC framework (BY-NC-ND and BY-NC-SA) will just make these authors leave CC.
I have just finished a paper on these topics with my co-authors, and will share it with the community soon, after getting it peer-reviewed. I certainly do not claim to have all the answers and I am always learning something new from this mailing list, but in the paper we deal with exactly these topics, so I felt compelled to respond :)
Giorgos
________________________________
From: cc-community-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of jonathon
Sent: Sun 9/16/2007 1:24 PM
To: cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [cc-community] What does NC means?
Milos wrote:
> more useless then I was thinking before (I was thinking that it is just useless).
I do see a place for CC-BY-NC-SA.
It just does not do what most people seem to think it does.
Perhaps there is a place for the CC-BY-NC-ND license, but I haven't found one.
I'd suggest that 99% of the people who select this license (BY-NC-ND),
did so thinking that it covered something that it does not cover.
> I think that there is a need for protecting authors in some cases.
What of an author's needs protection?
How does it need protection?
What problems/issues are you trying to solve?
>And I think that CC should work on such kind of issues.
Creative Commons Foundation is literally pioneering
cross-jurisdictional licensing law.
Consider one little detail:
* In Anglo-American law (US) a contract requires consideration;
* In Roman-Dutch law (South Africa) a contract does not require consideration;
* I've forgotten my Code Napoleon (France) but consideration is
treated differently, than under either Anglo-American law, of
Roman-Dutch law.
That difference is why the Creative Commons Licenses are contracts in
some countries, but not in other countries.
> But, it seems that CC doesn't work properly to protect authors rights.
It does, and it doesn't.
* Licenses are hard work;
* The Creative Commons Licenses are not geared to specific mediums.
This make them even harder to craft;
What is needed, is one of two things:
* Licenses crafted for each specific medium. painting, photography,
sculpture, dance, music, databases, novels, etc;
* The abolishment of NC and ND licenses;
> I think that I will use only GPL and GFDL until SFDL would be finished.
GPL is unusable for creative expression.
(What is the "source code" of a ballet? What is the source code of a
document in Moon?)
GFDL has a different set of issues, ensuring that it creates non-libre content.
SFDL fails the DRM Dave scenario, which means that although it
ostensibly meets Freedoms 0 thru 3, you can still end up with
something that is non-free by design.
( Debian-Legal can justify why something that is non-free can be
called "libre". They were the one's who made that determination.)
xan
jonathon
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Consult a lawyer for
sound legal advice.
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