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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Dana Powers" <dana.powers AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Free as in Gru
  • Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:02:32 -0700

I think this rant has gone on long enough, Greg.

Creative Commons makes no normative claim as to a preferred definition
of freedom.

CC provides legal tools so that authors can make this choice
themselves, knowing that reasonable people can disagree.

In fact, the entire purpose of CC licensing is to reduce transaction
costs by making it clear when users do not have to "ask first." CC's
primary goal is avoiding a permission culture (easy) not defining and
achieving a free culture (hard).

Of course, there is no doubt that CC would love to enable a Free
Culture, but they have stated again and again that this goal would be
better achieved by other organizations and advocacy groups. Free
Culture (http://www.freeculture.org/) is a great example.

I do hope that you rethink this binary world of "Freedom is" or
"freedom isn't." I don't even want to know how you would Define
Democracy. I hate to say it, but this seems to me like just another
example of Radical Absolutism fighting against Liberal Reformism.

Dana

On 4/26/07, Greg London <greglondon.1 AT gmail.com> wrote:
Can you explain to me why CC should use the
word "freedom" in a place where they could
be talking about something as restrictive as
CC-NC-ND-BY?

That isn't freedom. It's a pittance.
It is a token given by the original author
which has no major impact on the community.
The author could just as easily make the work
All Rights Reserved and give they work away
at no cost on his website.

What's that got to do with freedom?

People are seriously kidding themselves
that they're doing some grand service to
the world when they use some of the most
restrictive CC licenses.

They are effectively no different than
making the work ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
and offering them for download at no cost
on the authors website. And yet, no one would
for a second view THAT as having anything
to do with freedom. But playing some license
games, using CC-ND-NC-BY, and doing effectively
the same thing, same result, but through a word game
called a license, people think they're doing something
related to freedom.

CC appears to be encouraging it because it
encourages people to use their licenses.
And apparently, that's CC's priority. membership.
Total number of license users. The types of licenses
used is irrelevent. And the confusion CC's advertising
campaign leads to, apparently, is irrelevant.
All that matters is membership. Which means that
"freedom" has come to mean exactly the same thing
as words like "patriot": i.e. "you belong to our group".

And I think everyone on the list knows ex


On 4/26/07, Björn Terelius <bjorn.terelius AT gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Greg, can you explain to me why you think that the word freedom on the CC
homepage confuses people. After all, as far as I remember from the
discussion, nobody said that ND/NC were Free Software or even free (in the
common sense).
>
> I think that everybody on this list understand the CC licenses.
Furthermore, the description of each license is so clear that anybody who
knows th FSF definition of Free will understand that the CC licenses with NC
or ND does not qualify as Free Software.
>
>
> -Bjorn
>
> _______________________________________________
> cc-licenses mailing list
> cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
>
>


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