Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

James Grimmelmann said:
> At 02:34 AM 8/17/2004, Rob Myers wrote:
>
>>Boxing off commercial exploitation with the holy badge of NC takes nothing
>>back from the commercial entities that will profit from the creation and
>>distribution of the work regardless.
>>
> . . . because NonCommercial is also a form of anti-appropriation

ACK! Good grief, man, NO!

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

This was a lesson learned the very hard way way at the beginning
of the Open Source movement. All manner of licenses for software
sprang up that were "NonCommercial" use only. And it took a very
long time for people to separate out their personal myths
(Money is the root of all evil) from the reality of what
makes a gift economy thrive.

Yes, it's a form of anti-appropriation, but so is putting
a booby-trapped shotgun on your front door to keep out the
burglars. It's clumsy, indiscriminate, and foolish.


> provision.  The theory behind a significant number of NonCommercial uses is
> that one wants to keep companies from appropriating the work from the
> commons.

You are now arguing your case under the unstated premise that
NonCommercial puts a work in a "Commons".

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.

> it shares something of the GPL's spirit that profit-making which
> enhances the commons rather than diminishing it is totally fine.
> It just stakes out a different view of which borderline between
> "enhance" and "diminish" it will try to police.

No, with GNU-GPL, ANYONE can make a profit on a work.
With CC-NC, only the author can make a profit.
You're totally missing the game-theory view of GNU-FDL
versus CC-NC.

An author who uses the GNU-GPL effectively
cuts themselves off from any future choice that would
allow him to harm the gift economy. They commit themselves
to a certain course of action that makes the public
work/writing/art more important than the author.
Once you place a work under GNU-GPL, the community
can operate on it independent of the author and without
threat of the author doing something to undermine it.

an author who uses CC-NC is reserving the right to make
a move that could be potentially harmful to the public
version of the work. The author licenses a work CC-NC,
puts it on the web, allows the community to work with
it. When the community contributions have caused enough
interest in the work that a big-name company notices
the company goes to the original author and
buys the rights to create a commercial version that
could  undercut the version created by the community.

With CC-NC, the author reserves the right to take
an action that could harm the community contributions.

With GNU-GPL, the author surrenders that right irrevocably.

A gift economy project MUST use a gift economy license
that guarantees the authors surrender the right to
harm the gift economy in the future.


> There may also be people who want to wield NonCommercial as a weapon
> against companies in general, but simply don't understand the indirect
> support for platform and infrastructure companies that a vibrant media
> commons provides.  But I'd rather not say that everyone who uses a
> NonCommercial license -- including myself, Cory Doctorow, and Professor
> Lessig -- is morally confused.

Not morally confused, just confused. When I first discovered
Creative Commons, their front page talked a lot about "Commons"
and had a cartoon of a cow eating in a commons pasture.
But a "Commons" in the intellectual arena would be "Public Domain",
yet CC was pushing the CC-NC license and talking about giving away
free copies and later selling a comercial license to someone.
That is not a commons.

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

CC is about finding a way entice authors to give up some
of the exceedingly draconian rights to their works.
in exchange for some personal benefit.

"If you license your work CC-NC, you'll get free-advertising,
free distribution, by giving free-samples. And maybe someone
will pay you to use your work commercially"

But the work remains decidedly in the author's hands.

A lot of poeple have been trying to re-balance intellectual property
laws, trying to get CTEA rolled back, trying to get the DMCA thrown
out, and everyone has failed thus far. So, CC is a way to show people
that it is possible to be profitable without having a DMCA hit-squad
backing you up. But it is still about being profitable.

I don't have a problem with CC-NC. I've licensed some of my
writing that way, and intend to do some more when I have the time.
I'm doing it in the hopes of generating some interest in my
writing so that people will buy my sci-fi book.

I don't expect, nor would I encourage, anyone to attempt
to create a gift-economy based on my work licensed CC-NC.

What makes sense to me is having another writer/artist
create their own work, license it CC-NC, and then combine
it with mine.

One of my works is a poem about storms.
If an artist painted a cool picture of a storm,
licensed it CC-NC, and then put my words beside
it on their website, that would be a cool application.
We both use CC-NC, and we both have a private work that
we can sell.

The other use of CC-NC that I see would be to
recognize fan-fiction and similar derived works.
Fans do not expect to sell their works
(well, most of them know better anyway),
so there isn't any expectation that the
fan-fiction will become a gift-economy.
Fans are clear the works are the authors,
they just love the characters and the story,
so, I say why not allow it formally?

Another use is free distribution and free advertising.
Someone who likes my poem could put it on their
personal website and say "I really like this".
URL attribution would mean they'd put a link
back to my page, and if someone really likes it,
they might buy my book. People can recommend
a book they like and CC-NC allows them to
quote a piece of it if they want.

I am under no illusion that my CC-NC stuff will
ever create a gift-economy, though. I am simply of
the mind that there is more balanced way to treat
works as property of the author that does not
require the DMCA, CTEA, and digital rights
management software that effectively locks the
user out of their own computer.

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.

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.

Greg



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