Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Luke Stodola <lbs6380 AT cs.rit.edu>]

I very much agree with adulau, Per, and "greglondon".  There are two
distinct groups which the CC licenses cater to.  One are the artists who
want to use a restrictive license for some of their work to get enough
publicity to get people to buy the rest of their work under an even more
restrictive license.  As JBN said:
    JBN> However, the Creative Commons licenses aren't for licensing
    JBN> software.  Different freedoms are important for different
    JBN> kinds of works; I believe society is willing to trade away
    JBN> some freedoms in exchange for something else (like trading
    JBN> away commercial distribution for non-commercial verbatim
    JBN> distribution with pop song recordings--witness the original
    JBN> version of Napster).
Fine.  If an artist wants to do that, its ok with me.  This is really 
no different than sending out demo tapes to radio stations etc. in hopes of 
getting people to notice your music.  Just don't call it "open content", 
"free/libre music" etc.  I have no problem with this model existing; 
I'm just not interested in it personally.

The other side is the people who want to build a common pool of material, 
for all to use.  This is not a new idea:
   "There ought to be but one large art warehouse in the world, 
   to which the artist could carry his art-works, and from which 
   he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is, one must be 
   half a tradesman." -- Ludwig van Beethoven, January, 1801
       (from http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/ )
This is a noble goal, and I think it can work out.  The key is to not 
weaken that central warehouse, adding restrictions to its contents.

I agree that many people misunderstand the idea of non-commercial use.  
Money is important, because it enables an artist to get paid for 
their work.  Unless an artist has no need to get paid, he won't make use 
of a CC-BY-NC-SA work for a project, since it means after spending a 
significant amount of time on the project, he can't get paid for it.  
Commercial use is not inherently evil, and I think people need to be 
educated about this.

And educational-only? That sounds like a joke. (I'll admit I haven't read 
through the discussion archive for this license.)
How can you possibly take in information into your mind if you're not 
educating yourself?  I realize it is intended for certain educational 
settings, but I find this no less arbitrary.  To me, this seems more 
like the free-publicity case mentioned above.

The NoDerivs clause also falls strongly into the first category.  If 
you are putting your work in that central pool, you are granting others 
the right to be inspired by them, adapt them, translate them, etc.  If 
you simply want others to hear your work and then buy your CD, fine, 
but don't mistake that for free or open content.

Without adding these restrictions, there are already many ways for the 
original artist to make money from their work.  Many, if not most, people 
would be happy to support an artist's work, I think.

Luke Stodola.
dxdt.org/audio/