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

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  • From: James Grimmelmann <james.grimmelmann AT yale.edu>
  • To: <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Why do you have to chose the 'Attribution' option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?
  • Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 23:33:20 -0700

At 06:03 PM 8/16/2004, Greg London wrote:
The question is whether or not "many" CC licenses is an issue or not.

the main argument is that "many" licenses creates incompatibility
problems, or at the very least, questions of how to combine works
of different licenses such that all license requirements are still met.

This is a problem only if the original work is intended to become
derived many, many times beyond the original. I don't think this
is the Creative Commons model.

I would disagree that Creative Commons has "a" model. Creative Commons licenses are designed to work with a great many business models and a great many cultural models. The hope is that a simple _legal_ model can suffice to help many of these business and cultural models to flourish in a happy and symbiotic coexistence with each other.

I would strongly disagree with the idea that the creation of derivative works (and long chains of derivative works) is not really part of the Creative Commons model (even if we're only allowed to have one). From the outset, Creative Commons has pointed out the importance of creators having large bodies of shared content that they can rework, reimagine, and reinterpret as they develop derivative works of their own. And I think Creative Commons has been quite up front about these values: the Reticulum Rex video (http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/reticulum_rex/), for example, is very much about derivation and rederivation.

CC's "niche" is to offer Market-Economy
licenses that are more liberal that "All Rights Reserved", that leverage
some of its liberal rules in an attempt to offer free-distribution and
free-samples and free-word-of-mouth about some really cool work that
might not otherwise get noticed.

Your categories of Market Economy and Gift Economy provide one way of looking at models of creation. I don't know that things are so neatly categorized: in my summer at Creative Commons, I've talked to an awful lot of creators whom I'd be hard-pressed to put in one of those boxes or the other.

Many of them have content with one well-defined money-making channel, and they want to release that content into other channels, not from a desire to increase revenues, but from a sincere belief that they're giving something to the community at large (even in cases where doing so cuts into their money-making channel).

Others choose Attribution only, because they want their work picked up and transformed and available even to people who can't use ShareAlike for their derivative works.

Still others want to participate in what you'd call a "Gift Economy" but want to keep the corporations out entirely: they pick Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike so that their work is part of a cultural commons that can never turned into a source of revenue at all.

Personally, I think that taking all of these people's wishes seriously is the right thing to do, even though I often don't understand their particular motivations. I treasure that bafflement, actually, because it means they may have something important to teach me about creativity and making creativity work in our society. The person whom I think misunderstands a CC license may in fact understand something deeper and more important: they may be showing us a new and exciting way to use that license, or they may be showing us an opportunity for a new license to do some good.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that "getting noticed" is not the only goal of CC licensors who choose something other than CC-SA, and that these other goals are valuable.

CC's "twist" on licensing is to offer NonCommercial with a bunch of options.

I like to think that CC has something more to offer the world than this.

It may be helpful also to point out that there are three possible kinds of rules involved in CC licenses (indeed, in any similar license).
* Procedural requirements: What steps must someone take to use the licensed work? Must they pay a set fee? Must they give credit to the original author? Must they attach a copy of the license?
* Use restrictions: Can someone sell copies of the work? Can they use it in advertising? Can they use it contrary to the artistic intent of the original author?
* Derivative restrictions: Can they make derivative works? How transformative must derivative works be? Must derivative works be relicensed on particular terms?

Attribution is a procedural requirement. It doesn't much affect what you can do with the work, just what side tasks you need to carry out if you choose to do something with it. Paragraph 1 of the GPL is also a procedural requirement: it requires copyright notices, disclaimer of warranty, and redistribution of the license itself.

NonCommercial is a use restriction. It tells you a specific context in which you _cannot_ place the work. The Hacktivismo license's prohibitions on using the work to violate human rights are also use restrictions. So is the prohibition in the CC Sampling/Recombo license on using the work in advertising.

NoDerivs and ShareAlike are both derivative restrictions. They govern your ability to make derivative works. The "transformative" requirement in the Sampling/Recombo license is also a derivative restriction: only certain derivatives are allowed.


These categories are obviously not pure: it's easy to blur the lines with a little effort. But they really are independent axes along which one might impose rules, and Attribution-type procedural _requirements_ really shouldn't be completely conflated with NonCommercial-type use _restrictions_. NonCommercial tells you that no, you can't go to the beach (though you can go to the park), even if you jump up and down and hold your breath. Attribution tells you to go ahead and have fun at the beach, but to close the door behind you when you leave.


Since the Derivatives of a CC-NC document "peter out", incompatibility
issues are not a real issue. The issues never accumulate to the point
where some massive, multi-author, multi-generational, work would ever
get THIS >< close to being created, if it weren't for those pesky
alphabet-soup incompatibility problems.

This argument depends on the assumption that the form of creativity involved is the sort for which some monetary compensation is eventually required as an incentive to create. But if the _original_ author is creating for non-monetary reasons, then that's a strong indication that the type of creativity involved in downstream works may not be of the sort that requires monetary compensation either. Indeed, such an author who chooses a CC-NC license isn't really reserving to herself anything "more" than she gives to downstream creators, since no one anywhere along the chain cares about the money. With Creative Commons licenses there to eliminate the friction of licensing transaction costs, why couldn't such chains go on indefinitely?

Remember, also, that without a ShareAlike attribute in there, these chains can also eventually "escape" from the NonCommercial restriction. When the chain has modified the work enough that it no longer counts as a copy of the original, the original author has no copyright claim against it, and so compliance with the original CC-NC license is no longer necessary for someone who wants to use the profoundly-modified downstream work.

Now, people along the way might choose to license _their_ modifications also under CC-NC. Or they might not. But that's their choice.

The BSD advertising clause showed people in the open-source community
how such "overhead" can accumulate to the point where it becomes
almost as much work to derive a work with advertising clauses as it
does to create a new work from scratch with no advertising restrictions.

"Appropriate to the medium" is a powerful phrase; it incorporates a sensitivity to the degree of onerousness of compliance with the attribution overhead.


Yes, for gift economy licenses, incompatibility is a killer.
but as soon as you slap NonCommercial on a work, you are no
longer talking about a gift-economy license. you are talking
about a market economy license.

I don't think you can separate licenses, or creators, into two camps quite that easily. If these are the right categories for thinking about creative economies, then almost all creation, I think, draws on both models and is something of a mixture.


I am NOT a lawyer. I do NOT speak for Creative Commons.

James




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