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cc-licenses - Re: what is freedom? was: Re: Why do you have to chose the 'Attribution' option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: what is freedom? was: Re: Why do you have to chose the 'Attribution' option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?
  • Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:25:00 +0100

On 17 Aug 2004, at 18:39, Greg London wrote:

Commercial use of a work has nothing to do with whether or not
the work becomes private.

Indeed. Anticapitalism/antiglobalisation and Free Software/Culture are both reform movements. They are neither opposed nor coincident.

Stop kidding yourself. The only license that truly creates
a "Commons" is Public Domain licenses like CC-PD or BSD
sans the advertising clause.

Not even GNU-GPL or ShareAlike place a work in a commons.
They retain enough restrictions to prevent copyright forks, etc.

But they also ensure the maintenance and continued growth of a (pseudo-)commons. BSD doesn't create a commons, it creates a buffet.

Creative Commons is not about creating gift-economies, creating massive
multi-user projects that live and grow forever. It is about re-balancing
intellectual property laws that have gone horribly wrong with the likes
of the DMCA and CTEA. CC is about "balanced" intellectual property laws,
which still places the work in the realm of the authors PROPERTY, something
for the authors benefit. It is not about making a work/writing/art into
a community property and figuring out how to protect it as community property.

It's a reform project. GPL and CC are both attempts to reform IP through contracts that ironise copyright law. Both are also responses to specific incidents (Stallman's Symbolics war, Lessig's Eldred case).

The fact that none of CC's licenses include any sort of "source code"
requirement shows that the emphasis is NOT on project building.

Possibly a PUSH component for the CC licenses, based on the GPL's requirements for the provision and redistribution of source code, would be a good idea for the future. IMVHO CC's licenses seem to be based on a sampling rather than a source code model, although it's great to see projects like Momjobo's release of all the component tracks of their album.

[...]
recognize fan-fiction and similar derived works.
[...]
Another use is free distribution and free advertising.

Fan fiction and file sharing (free distribution/circulation) are both contentious social issues at the moment, and it's good for CC to provide the legal tools to help.

CC-NC is, in my opinion, a more balanced way to
approach intellectual property, but the emphasis
is that it still remains property of the author.

I think CC would be happy that you've got something from their toolbox....

When I want to attempt to create a gift-economy,
I use a gift-economy license, something that
makes the work COMMUNITY PROPERTY, and protects
it in that venue.

I think CC-BY-SA-2.0 is possibly close enough (yes, my position on this is shifting after much thought), allowing for BY as a kind of backdoor PUSH. (Better name for PUSH, anyone? SM = Source Materials, PC = Provide content don't really work.... :-) )

- Rob.





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