[cc-community] my problem with Free Beer
John Hendrik Weitzmann
jhweitzmann at mx.uni-saarland.de
Sat Mar 1 15:08:49 EST 2008
hi
today we had a nice Free Beer brewing session here in Berlin (see
http://www.freebeer.org/blog/), the resulting 100 liters are going to
make the closing party of this year's re:publica conference even more
fun, that's for sure.
I like the idea, I like the nerdiness and I like the spirit behind
_this_ kind of free beer, too. Yet, I wonder if I'm the only one who has
a problem with choosing, of all things, a recipe as the object for
demonstrating how free licensing works?
On the Free Beer website they say:
"The recipe and branding elements of FREE BEER is published under a
Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5) license, which means that
anyone can use the recipe to brew their own FREE BEER or create a
derivative of the recipe."
Well, of course anyone can brew any beer they like, but not thanks to a
CC license. The list of steps for brewing + the list of ingredients is
simply not protected by any law (does anyone know of jurisdictions where
this doesn't apply?). It's part of the public domain.
The only things possibly licensable are the brand, logo a.s.o.
They go on with:
"Anyone is free to earn money from FREE BEER, but they must publish the
recipe under the same license and credit our work."
Not true. The CC license is not intended for restricting the use of
things that are in the public domain anyway, that is also spelled out in
the license itself (see section 2). Anyone is free to brew beer
following the free beer recipe, sell it, earn money from it and does
_not_ have to give credit to anyone.
People who don't know about copyright law are led to think that they
have to obey to some conditions that are actually bogus. Its quite the
same as if a museum tries to monopolise ancient artefacts through some
kind of license. The CC community is always one of the first to protest
against that kind of practice ...
And finally:
"FREE BEER is based on Vores Øl v. 1"
And what was Vores Øl v. 1 based upon? I presume that the Free Beer
people haven't re-invented beer brewing altogether, just by themselves.
Does anyone agree that the Free Beer way of "demonstrating" CC licenses
is not just one with a little but basically neutral flaw, but is in fact
more like a good example how not to use licenses?
not expecting any mercy
John
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