[cc-community] to build the commons
Rob Myers
rob at robmyers.org
Mon Oct 27 05:51:13 EDT 2008
On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Fred Benenson <fred.benenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Indeed, this is a bit off topic, but I just did this and switched my
> licenses from BY-SA to vanilla BY. I wrote in depth on why I did this here:
>
> http://fredbenenson.com/blog/2008/10/22/moving-on-from-copyleft/
Any license requires explaining, any license will be ignored,
derivation is as difficult as you wish to declare it to be, and
freedom for photographs is important. Ask anyone who cannot track down
their wedding photographer after thirty years.
Calling a copyleft license "share alike" confuses people. Copyleft
exists to protect the ability to use the work freely. In the case of
BY-SA it exists to protect free speech. It doesn't exist to create a
gift economy (although that is a secondary effect of it). And BY
isn't "more free" than BY-SA when viewed from the position of rights
rather than simplistic economics.
To comment on two specific points:
"Some people believe that copylefted material should not place an
undue burden on mainstream press when using photos"
Media corporations should not have any privilege above public interest
or fair use defenses in using copylefted work. Ensuring that
individuals are not free to answer the speech of media corporations
isn't something that we should be trying to support.
"Google, for example, chose the permissive Apache license (basically
the software equivalent to CC's Attribution license) for their Android
platform because it not only allows the codebase to be open source /
free software, but because it encourages other companies to adopt it
without further complications to their work flow and software stacks."
Privileging software producing corporations in this way will be a
great comfort to the users of Android and its derivatives when they
cannot fix the software on their handsets or get hold of proprietary
source code that the Apache license allows to be kept private.
Popularity is not the same as success.
- Rob.
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