Development of Creative Commons licenses

[email AT greglondon.com]

On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 13:14:38 -0500, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> The way the 2.0 licenses put it, you can combine two works under SA
> licenses, accumulating all the license stipulations for both. So if
> you've got one work that's by-sa, and another that's by-nc, the
> resulting work is by-sa-nc.
> 
> The problem with this is that it goes against the wishes of the
> original licensors. Probably the most troubling is that you can take
> a Work available for everyone to use, and mix it with an *-sa-nc-*
> work, and the result is not available for everyone to use.
> 
> The argument made so far is that it's more important to make
> "remixing" works easy than it is to respect the wishes of the original
> licensors. I, for one, find that kind of hard to swallow, and probably
> self-defeating.

Yes. I picked CC-BY-SA specifically BECAUSE I think Non-Commercial
and Educational-Only are restrictions that keep the work from
really entering the "Public Commons". If someone wants their work
to contribute to the public commons idea, then EVERYONE should be
able to do take advantage of the work. 

Somehow the thinking is that its OK to tack Non-Commercial onto
a derived version of my work, which, in my opinion, has the effect 
of FENCING OFF the work from the commons, even though I specifically
chose NOT to put that fence up.

Look, Creative Commons has a great idea of creating a public commons
of music, video, and text works. the CC-BY-SA license achieves this
because any work licened under CC-BY-SA can be used by anyone for
any reason, the only stipulation is that the SA clause keeps it
in the public commons. 

If you can tack on RESTRICTIONS like Non-Commercial and EducationOnly,
then you're allowing the work to slowly be taken out of the public
commons, and you're fencing it off into a smaller area that is
"Teachers only, non-profit" and similar niche subsets of the 
whole public domain.

The fact is that Creative Commons licenses are incompatible because
it allows so many friggen options, a number of which have nothing
to do with building a public commons, but instead have more to do
with creating a FLEA MARKET of individual retailers hoping free
samples of their work will increase sales of a commercial version
of their work. These are vendors looking at new advertising schemes
to make money off their work, they aren't people looking to contribute
to a creative public commons.

My training manual is CC-BY-SA, which means ANYONE can do ANYTHING
they want with it as long as they don't take it out of the PUBLIC
commons.  Allowing someone to put up a fence that says "Non-Commercial 
only" is taking it out of the public commons.

Can someone sell copies of my work? sure. but I don't care because
the work remains in the public commons. Can they change my work,
sure, but I dont care, because the changes remain in the commons.

Creative Commons, in its own FAQ pages, is fostering the idea of using
its licenses for free advertising for your work so that you can then
sell commercial licenses to your work for those willing ot pay.
This is a flea market model, not a public commons. people giving away
just enough rights so that the work could move around freely, and
hopefully get noticed, so that soemeone is willing to pay for it.

But the work effectively remains under the control of teh author.
it is a proprietary model, not a public commons model.

The CC-BY-SA license is a public commons license.
The CC-BY-SA-NC license is a flea market license.

They are effectively incompatible with each other because they represent
two totally different models of how to treat works. One puts it in a 
public commons that anyone can use for their own benefit, the other 
hands out free samples while the original author hopes to make a buck.

And the ShareAlike 2.0 is effectively saying that its OK to take
works out of the public commons and fence it off into a flea market
section.