[cc-community] What does NC means?
Milos Rancic
millosh at gmail.com
Sun Sep 16 13:45:22 EDT 2007
There are two major issues related to NC:
1. NC is not NC, which implies that even authors who have reasonable
reasons for using NC are not protected.
2. It is possible to use NC for anything, which implies that we have
bigger and bigger mass on the Internet.
Both of the issues are social responsibility of CC.
1) NC is not NC because it is possible to use NC content commercially.
If author says that something is NC, this means that it is NC and that
it may not be used for any kind of making profit (without author's
approval, of course). It is so obvious that I am thinking that I am
living in some different universe because, according to different
theories, third party is possible to use NC content for making profit.
There are two possible reasons for such situation: (1) CC lawyers are
incapable to make licenses clear or (2) CC doesn't want to make it
clear.
Both reasons imply that no one is safe not only with NC, but with
other licenses, too. Oh, yes, no one except big companies.
And excuse that it is pioneer work is not relevant. FSF has copyleft
licenses for around 20 years and CC is, unlike FSF, place with a big
number of lawyers. And problems related to FSF licenses were never
related to authors rights, but to technical problems emerged from new
technologies (DRM) and new kinds of usage (wiki). We are not talking
here about localization of CC licenses for Serbia jurisdiction, but
about basic principles of licenses inside of the common law in USA.
Also, I can't believe that a couple of FSF lawyers are more capable
the a hundreds of CC lawyers.
All of the explicit and implicit conclusions from this issue is saying
that CC licenses are not safe place for authors. When it is possible
to trick NC conditions even the common sense is saying something
opposite, then I may conclude that it is possible to do the same with
SA condition, too.
I am using BY-SA (with GFDL) for my texts only because I think that
text is more useful if it is not needed to copy the whole GFDL license
with the original text. However, according to tricking NC conditions,
it seems that BY-SA is the same as PD, which implies that BY-SA
doesn't have sense, too.
2) Everyone has responsibility for her/his own work. CC took the job
to make legislation better in the world of bizarre Mickey Mouse laws.
And, of course, I support such aim.
And consequences of taking such job are taking some responsibilities,
too. CC doesn't have responsibilities only for making good laws, but,
as a global organization with global aims, it has global social
responsibilities, too.
"Someone is using licenses for wrong purpose" is just an excuse for
removing responsibility from CC and doing nothing. I am not saying
that a car manufacturer is responsible for every single crazy person
who drive a car, but I am saying that responsibility of car
manufacturers is to make cars more safe for drivers and pedestrians.
If we are talking about NC safety on Internet -- it doesn't exist.
People may be fooled to make significant contributions to
collaborative sites with the consequence that they are not able to
print their text and sell it for reasonable amount of money. But, of
course, they are not warned that big companies are able to use their
text without any real problem.
They are not warned that their contributions are completely useless
out of Internet, also. They are not warned that their contributions
are contaminated for at least 70 years (if all of contributors die at
this moment). Even that "Founder License" is better then NC because
text is free after 28 years. And, of course, they are not warned that
they will not get a cent from their copyright even there are companies
which would get more then a cent from their work.
Such mass was not produced by FSF, by Internet, by any particular
government, it is not produced even by those particular users or even
site owners -- it is produced by CC. And responsibility of CC is to
try to solve it.
* * *
I realize that NC licenses are necessary for some types of works and I
support their usage in such works. Two major issues above are not
related to the existence of NC, but to the obvious *global* *social*
*problems* generated by CC.
On 9/16/07, Giorgos Cheliotis <giorgos at smu.edu.sg> wrote:
> 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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