[cc-community] my problem with Free Beer
John Hendrik Weitzmann
jhweitzmann at mx.uni-saarland.de
Sun Mar 9 19:34:18 EDT 2008
the geeky spirit is good, the tongue-in-cheek value is funny, if it gets
people interested in free licensing, all the better. But you can have
all that w/o the "you must meet the conditions XY if you want to use the
recipe"-flaw.
I doubt that the project makes people educate themselves on copyright
issues, they just believe that what it says on the website is correct.
So, call it miseducating instead of misleading, but the result is
visible all over the net. The wording "you are allowed to make
[OpenCola|Free Beer] as long as you respect the provisions of
[GPL|GFDL|CC-BY]" has spread to countless pages.
It would be quite easy to avoid this. The way these explanations are
drafted now they are involuntarily promoting the idea that ingredients +
steps is protected. Somehow the secrecy around Coca Cola seems to foster
the idea, instead of pointing people in the opposite direction, which it
should do according to logic.
If enough people believe in idea protection like this, it will become a
reality without anyone changing any laws. It's what is in german called
the normative power of the factual, there's probably a similar
expression in english.
But well, the geekyness (geekiety, geekhood?) of Free Beer seems to
immunise it against critique in general. So may St. IGNUcius be with us
all ...
looking forward to drinking our truly free beer at re:publica,
John
Greg London schrieb:
> Well, since most commercial recipes are held as trade secrets
> (Coca Cola, anyone?) I think trying to come up with a FLOS
> recipe for anything has some merit, whether it is technically
> an outcome of a CC license or the fact that recipes can't be
> put under copyright in the first place.
>
> Plus, I do see it as having some geeky tongue-in-cheek value
> as well. "Free as in Speech versus Free as in Beer" is a phrase
> that's been around FLOS since FLOS started. I probably would
> have done something like that if I knew how to brew beer.
>
> If it gets people who aren't already members of the choir
> interested in FLOS projects as an idea, and if the result
> of that is the person has to get themselves somewhat
> educated about what copyright does and does not do, then
> I find it hard to believe that anyone would suddenly feel
> that they had the wool pulled over their eyes by this
> Free Beer recipe thingy.
>
> Technically it may not be accurate.
> But I don't see anyone stating that they were willfully
> mislead by the campaign.
>
> As far as I can see, no harm, no foul.
>
> Greg
>
>
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