[cc-community] to build the commons

Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher at gmail.com
Thu Oct 23 21:44:48 EDT 2008


2008/10/24 elliott bledsoe <elliott at creativecommons.org.au>:
> hey brianna the idea sounds interesting. would do you envisage these pages
> on tobuildthecommons.cc as doing? explaining how allowing derivative work
> and commercial use build the commons? would this be restricted to just cc? i
> think that there is scope for including other "copyleft" licences that just
> the cc by-sa licence.

Pretty much. And allowing people who deliberately use licenses such as
CC-BY-SA to visibly say "yeah, I support this and I use this license
for this reason".

There is scope for including other copyleft licenses besides CC-BY-SA, but....

I guess I am thinking about this in the context of the history of free
software. The idea of encouraging everyone to use the GPL is that it
creates a large central body of work that you (if you are writing
something else GPL) can use without question, without nitpicking,
without checking any details. If it is large enough it becomes a
reliable resource and that in turn fuels growth of it.

Now that people "get" copyleft and open source there are many open
source projects that are successful with less restrictive licenses
such as LGPL or MIT (analagous to CC-BY). But these projects are
always vulnerable in a way that GPL projects are not. Because there is
a lot of goodwill and most coders are just hobbyists it often seems as
if the copyleft clause doesn't matter. But in a crisis it can.

Creative Commons is by far the dominant, widely adopted and used open
licensing scheme, and given that there are not yet any other licenses
it has been deemed compatible with, encouraging people to use a
different copyleft license (GFDL? :o) seems like an invitation for yet
another content silo.

> i guess the issue is that a project like this is quite obviously making a
> decision about what the commons is (ie stuff that allows derivatives and
> commercial use) which i think is a bit limiting.

Well, yes. It is my decision and I stand by it. :)

It's obvious that there is a spectrum of freedom (for users) between
"all rights reserved" and "no rights reserved". I'm not really content
to just say "oh well, as long as it's not all-rights-reserved, that's
wonderful; I'm ever so grateful!" I envisage this as a positive
campaign to encourage people to move further along the spectrum.

i personally think that
> content that is available for reuse on any terms that is  more permissive
> than all rights reserved is a good thing. of course ideally the more open
> the better (by or by-sa being the best). i try to avoid making decisions
> about which licences are better than others. there are some content owners
> who will never release by-sa or by, so i would rather see it available
> by-nc-sa or by-nc or even by-nc-nd or by-nd than nothing at all.

I understand that that is Creative Commons' position (whether you are
speaking as a CCer or a community member) but I think there is also
space for advocating within the license choices that CC offers.

As a Wikimedian any works with NC or ND clauses are just dead to me.
They may as well be all rights reserved for all the good they are to
me.  Maybe my project idea is an advocacy sister to the Definition of
Free Cultural Works <http://freedomdefined.org/>.

I am not saying "give me CC-BY-SA or death". More like "If you're
already pre-disposed to CC, think about these topics in relation to
which license you choose". I'm not going to like, name and shame
people that use NC and ND licenses. :)

cheers
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/


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