[cc-community] FYI: comment by Eric S Raymond on CC
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Thu Feb 14 03:27:12 EST 2008
Matthew J. Agnello wrote:
> It's important to remember that while the discussion over what
> constitutes NC is an important one, it's a far more controlled
> discussion than what constitutes fair use. The CC license has still
> done its work and managed to carve out a small but significant lawyer-
> free zone.
I think the frustration is that most of us feel that it wouldn't be that
difficult to make a *much better* version of NC that didn't have so much
ambiguity.
I suspect that the reason for this is that CC is capitalizing on the
ambiguity -- by allowing users (both licensors and licensees) to have
mutually-conflicting ideas about what NC means, the license appears to
be "all things for all people". People see what they want, instead of
what's there. So CC avoids pinning down the meaning in a binding way.
Sure, there were guidelines "published", but I use the quotes advisedly.
It would be more accurate to say they were "buried". More importantly,
there's a conflicting set of guidelines from MIT, and neither set is
actually reflected in the language of the license itself.
Certainly, the users aren't getting it. I see misconceptions left and
right about what NC means and/or what it's for.
For one thing, I think it is very ambiguously named. After all, the
reason to use the "Non-Commercial" license is precisely that you want to
make "Commercial" sales of copies of your work! It would've been more
sensible to call it "CRR" for Commercial Rights Reserved" (or just "CR"
to preseve the two-character abbreviations).
Because one irritating thing is people who use the NC license "because
they don't plan to make money from it" (yes, I've heard this rationale
before). Such users ABSOLUTELY should be using SA, not NC.
So, yeah, the "fair use" debate is worse, but NC is worse than it needs
to be, and I think that's the source of the complaints about it. Not so
much that it is *so* awful, but that it doesn't seem like there's any
solid *reason* for it not to be better.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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