[cc-community] Being called a thief for using CC

Miguel Angel Barrera mabarrera70 at gmail.com
Sun Feb 17 00:37:09 EST 2008


> And then Miguel gets caught in the middle of this huge misunderstanding, when
> in fact it seems that he complied with the terms of the license. It's just that the
> terms did not reflect what the licensor really wanted to achieve.

Giorgos, I agree with you 100% about this is a case where the author
chose a license not in synch with what they were willing to "give up".

Of course we have sour grapes with them for calling us thieves and
launching a campaign where we are portrayed as doing something
illegal. But leaving that aside, something that bother us a lot is to
see the supporters of their campaign telling us "we know what the CC
is, we love it, and people like you are giving it a bad name". And
that bother us because we've thought really hard about that
accusation, yet we just can't see how can we be the ones hurting the
CC.

We did what we did because we felt it was not only legal but also
ethically acceptable by the owner. They, after all, are using for
their translations content from a third party that has numerous
"mirror" sites. We simply did not expect this kind of comeback, but of
course, should Observatorio had used a license that wouldn't allow us
to use their content to create fadd.corank.com, we simply would have
not done it.

Now we know the owner doesn't feel that way, and we might decide to
close our site to respect that, or do something different, but that
would most definitely be presented by these guys as a "See? we were
right!" instead of a good faith move from us (considering how they've
treated us, that'd be a hell lot of a good faith move) and *that* is
something we are not going to accept. That's why we're still measuring
our options. And while the details are more about us and them, I do
think that something in the CC is being lost on whomever learns about
the issue from them and agrees with the way they're presenting this
whole thing.

Thanks everyone for your feedback!
M. Angel


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