[cc-education] proliferation, balkanization

Ben Crowell cceducrowell03 at lightandmatter.com
Thu Aug 28 15:07:28 EDT 2003


Dave Wiley wrote:
>Thanks for your messages last night. If had been anyone else I would
>have thought it was a denial of service attack on the list. =)
You mean my attack failed? :-)
It's nice to be in touch again, and I'm glad my sometimes strident
opinions don't seem to have offended you.

> If you've ever
>been 10 weeks into teaching 8th grade math in an inner city school in
>New York without textbooks because the school system can't afford them,
>you would thank the Maker for free materials,
There are many laudable goals that are nevertheless inappropriate for
CC in my opinion. At my school, there is a program to donate physical
books to Ethiopia. It's great, but it has nothing to do with the concept
of the /commons/. Likewise, the proposed cc.edu license seems to me to
violate the concept of a commons. It's not a commons if it provides a
way of excluding people. Logically, we could next have the cc.god license,
to be used only in churches.

I wrote:
>The question is not whether there's anyone who wants a certain licensing scheme.
>The question is whether CC should lend its name and legal expertise to it. If
>people don't want to contribute to the world of free information, that's their
>business, but I don't see why they deserve any help with it. The "Commons" in
>Creative Commons has to mean something. It's not possible to say one is putting
>something in the commons and yet denying access to soldiers, politicians, arabs, jews,
>or people who talk on their cell phones while driving SUVs.
Dave wrote:
>Overstating for effect is generally my sole territory, but you've done
>it well here. =) Your encouragement of everyone writing their own
>license would only significantly increase the confusion you wanted to
>avoid in your last post. It also creates the same troubles OPL did,
>namely the creation and evangelism of licenses by people with no formal
>legal background.
I would like to /discourage/ people from writing their own licenses, and I
would also like to /discourage/ people from using a discriminatory license
such as cc.edu.


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