Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Todd A. Jacobs said:
> On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 12:43:49AM -0500, Greg London wrote:
>
>> Does the ShareAlike addon gain anything?  Or is it the reflection of a
>> lack of understanding of the licenses by users? Do people get caught
>
> Sure it does. SA means that someone downstream can't change the terms of
> the license by making it either more free or more restrictive. SA is a
> good choice when the content owner wants to ensure that the terms of
> derivatives can't be modified.

If a work is licensed CC-NC, no one downstream can make a derivative
"more free" by making it CC-PD or something. The work and all derivatives
will always be at least as restrictive as CC-NC.

Someone could create a derivative work and could slap
"all rights reserved" on it, but the CC-NC is still
active and they can't make money off of that work,
even if they won't Share it with anyone.

>> 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?
>
> I don't see why you think "sharing" should equal "commercial." BY-NC-SA
> means "do what you like with my work, so long as you don't make money on
> it." It's a way to reserve monetary potential for the original creator,
> while still releasing the content into the commons for personal uses or
> community-based improvements.

No one has incentive to invest any large amount of effort into a
CC-NC-SA work because the original author can always trump their
community-based-improvements with a commercially-paid version.

The point of copyleft and sharealike is to keep the work and all
its derivatives as equals so that no derivative can be taken
private and compete against the community version of the work.

CC-NC-SA not only doesn't keep all the derviatives equal,
it witholds the commercial rights to the work upfront,
which then can be used by the author at a later date to
compete against any "community based improvements".

An author who releases a work CC-NC-SA is reserving the
right to compete against the community, therefore the
community has no incentive to contribute improvements
of any significance.

This means "community-based-improvements" have the same
amount of incentive under CC-NC as they do CC-NC-SA.
Either way, the author is reserving the right to
compete against anything the community might come up with.

The -SA option just means the fans can't compete against
themselves. whoop-de-doo. As long as the Author holds
the trump card, and can compete against the fans commercially,
it's an irrelevant difference.

Just stop for a second and read the name of the license.

ShareAlike.

SHARE ALIKE.

How do you "share and share alike", "one for all and
all for one" while witholding commercial rights
exclusively for yourself?

It is an oxymoron.

> Personally, I think BY-NC-SA is the most likely license to gain
> widespread acceptance for textual works, and it looks like the pie chart
> currently bears that out.

Yeah, and "share-ware" was a really popular licensing model
a while ago, but it eventually faded out.

> Remember, the copyright owner can always
> release a work under a more open license in the future, but can never
> put the genie back in the bottle. There's nothing wrong with reserving
> rights; BY-NC-SA strikes a nice balance, IMHO.

balance between what?
author and community?

It seems its a balance for the author to quell his fear
of just going CC-NC and so decides to slap an additional
restriction on it.