Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Tuesday, March 01, 2005, at 05:43AM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> 
wrote:

>I'm a little concerned that the biggest slice of the pie
>is an oxymoron of a license: CC-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

I don't like CC-BY-NC-SA either. It's non-free.

>The second biggest slice is NonCommercial-NoDerivatives,
>and I suppose CC-NC-SA is less resrictive than CC-NC-ND,
>but i can't see any real world difference between CC-NC-SA
>and plain CC-NC.

CC-NC-ND is a good license for legal file sharing, distributed caching of web 
content and weblog quoting. It's good for demos and bootlegs and other 
publicity/community content. It serves a useful purpose in the current 
copyright environment for both producers and consumers.

>Does the ShareAlike addon gain anything?  

The sharealike builds a noncommercial community or stream rather than just 
providing a noncommercial gift or source.

>Or is it the
>reflection of a lack of understanding of the licenses by users?
>Do people get caught up in the idea of "Sharing" their
>content and so they add ShareAlike even when it doesn't
>make sense when you've got NonCommercial in front of it?

There are three possibilities that I can think of:
1. People are more into Adbusters-type anticapitalism than previously thought.
2. People are just choosing the individual license options that appeal to 
them out of context.
3. People want to allow and participate in a folk culture, a 
noncommercial/fan/public culture of the sort that Free Culture / No Logo 
discuss being commercialised/privatised.

I'd like to believe 3. People want to share their work but not get ripped off 
(or rip anyone off). Which license does that sound like? :-) This is a valid 
social and personal position that cannot be conceptualised by a straight 
copyleft/proprietary split. It may not best be captured by CC-BY-NC-SA, but 
that's another matter...

- Rob.