[cc-community] Being called a thief for using CC
Miguel Angel Barrera
mabarrera70 at gmail.com
Sat Feb 16 06:10:35 EST 2008
Hello everyone,
There's a project named Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD @
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/) that publishes an astronomy picture
every day along with an explanation.
Then, there's a project named Observatorio.info (http://observatorio.info)
that publishes the same content, but translated into Spanish, under a
by-nc-sa CC license.
A couple of monts ago we decided to create a different site (
http://fadd.corank.com) that takes the picture from APOD and copies the
translations from Observatorio.info (respecting 100% the by-nc-sa license)
but with a different interface, and a few different features.
This caused the person in charge of Observatorio to launch an aggressive
campaign against our site (I'll spare you the details), and at this moment
they have a very visible note in their site that, translated to English,
says:
"SOMEONE IS TAKING ADVANTAGE OF OUR FREE TRANSLATION WORK: Support our
complaint against the illegal copy of contents from this project"
Taking advantage? Illegal?
As a result, our site has received numerous comments from people insulting
us, calling us thieves, shameless thugs, telling us that it's people like us
who give the CC a bad name, and much much worst things. We had managed to
build a small community of people who like astronomy, that used to comment
on the site, but even we tried to keep all those insulting comments out of
the site, after all these attacks, most of them have left.
Now this person is not only - we feel - misleading their visitors by making
them believe that what we're doing is illegal (and possibly creating a small
herd of people who will assume future cases like this one should be treated
in the same way), but he is also writing in several blogs that he's found a
"hole" in the CC license, because he released his work under CC so people
could republish/reference/etc PARTS of their work, but not so people could
duplicate all of the translations even if all the CC terms are honored.
All we've done is to use the rights the CC license gives us, respecting of
course the nc-by-sa (we even place a linkable icon of Observatory in our
welcome page). We tried to explain this person that we feel that his view "a
piece is ok, the entire work is not" is more consistent with copyright
content and "fair use" than with Creative Commons, but that hasn't changed
things a bit.
At times I've wondered if he might be right, but I always end up thinking
that this person is not coherent with the license he chose, and when I read
the CC FAQ that says "We all admire generous souls. But if you want to be
generous, we want you to think carefully about it before you are." I believe
it is not us who give the CC a bad name, but it is him, for using it, then
getting royally pissed when someone came along and applied it, and now
launching such a campaign talking about "sad story about how someone took
advantage of the CC". We want to do the right thing, but if the right thing
is to close our site, then the CC licenses do have a very serious flaw, and
more people is going to get hurt - both those who license their content
under the CC, and those who use it legally and then get hammered for doing
so.
I don't know. Perhaps this is an issue worth discussing? What do you think?
Regards,
M.Angel
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