[cc-licenses] New licensing buttons

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Mon Apr 2 16:41:36 EDT 2007


The buttons look nice, but there are problems with the lack of suggested
use and the use on freedomdefined.org.

* Merely putting one of these buttons on one's site does not identify a
specific license used.  There is no indication on
http://freedomdefined.org/Logos_and_buttons that one should link to the
specific license used.

* fd.o links to http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/CC-BY-2.5 rather than
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ which means the page will
not be recognized by Google or Yahoo! as falling under the intended
license.

I suggested some better practices at the bottom of
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2007-February/001579.html

        If I were you I would encourage people to use the standard CC
        buttons/link and a free button that could be placed alongside
        the CC
        license button and would link to something like
        http://freedomdefined.org/check
        
        The code at that URL would scrape the referrer.  If content at
        the
        referrer includes a link to an approved license, the user gets a
        page explaining why the license is free, if not they get warned
        of a bogus usage of the free button and encouraged to use a
        really free license.

Actually, if I were you :-) I'd probably come up with a single set of logos
that don't mention a specific license for use as above, especially given 
that you've defined some requirements (source) that aren't inherent in 
several of the qualifying licenses or public domain.




On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 07:48 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> The http://freedomdefined.org/ team is happy to announce the
> publication of a new set of licensing buttons for Free Cultural Works.
> These can be found at:
> 
> http://freedomdefined.org/Logos_and_buttons
> 
> They clearly identify works as being under a particular license, and
> also show the "Free Cultural Works" logo which symbolizes that all the
> Four Freedoms from http://freedomdefined.org/ are granted to users of
> the material (including the often denied freedom to make commercial
> use).
> 
> The Definition of Free Cultural Works was recently adopted by the
> Wikimedia Foundation for Wikipedia and its sister projects, and is
> also linked from the Free Software Definition at:
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
> 
> These buttons are in the public domain; there are no trademarks or
> other rights claimed, either.
> 
> I would like to encourage all authors adopt these buttons to show your
> support for the freedom in Free Culture.
-- 
  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:Mike_Linksvayer




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