[cc-community] Identi.ca - my new Creative-Commons-enabled microblogging service

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Jul 7 16:27:06 EDT 2008


Matthew J. Agnello wrote:
> However, something in me still feels
> that forcing a BY license on a user would be wrong. I would rather see
> someone gladly not enforce their copyright than be forced to use a
> specific license.

"Force" is a curious term to use here. If you don't like the "By"
license, then don't use the site, it's as simple as that.

Having a single license makes the site useful to the reader/user of the
material. This is destroyed if you don't require a certain license of
people who post (and remember that ALL SITES impose _some_ kind of
license on you, or they couldn't publish your work legally).

I understand that Drew likes the By-SA license, and one could imagine a
similar site based on that. However, it's also true that microblogging
is skating on the edge of copyrightability anyway. Certainly, creating
any kind of aggregate from such tiny pieces would be burdensome if the
transaction overheads of licensing are considered.

In fact, I honestly think Public Domain would make more sense, since
even Attribution requires too much overhead for this kind of use.

Of course, I have to admit, I'm not entirely sure what sort of valuable
aggregate is possible from such source material, so it seems to me that
the license is symbolic more than anything else (who is going to _want_
to copy this information?).

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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