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cc-licenses - Re: Concerns: CC-BY and Debian

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Branko Collin" <collin AT xs4all.nl>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Concerns: CC-BY and Debian
  • Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 12:53:45 +0100


On 11 Mar 2005, at 6:28, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Branko Collin wrote:
>
> > Could you expand a little bit on this, especially WRT what you
> > consider to be "free" and "freedom"?
>
> Let's be careful not to confuse Debian's opinions and my own. I have
> been mostly reporting on what Debian says. The definition of "free"
> that Debian uses is that in the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
>
> Now, I did say that CC-BY is more free than the FDL. But all I meant
> by that is that it imposes fewer restrictions.
>
> > (granted, I only looked at the bit about DRM before I turned
> > away irritated).
>
> Then ignore the DRM stuff and read the rest. :-)
> An example of what Debian considers non-free is the presence of
> invariant sections. You an see why. Suppose someone gives you an FDL
> document with an invariant section equal to the entire document. It's
> already happened.
>
> The ability to modify the text is one of the rights and priviledges
> that Debian and others associate with "free". Of course there will
> always be constraints, and you have to draw the line at some grey
> point. But the basic idea is that you should be able to modify the
> content within "reasonable" parameters.

FSF: "The idea of invariant sections is that they give you a way to
express nontechnical personal opinions about the topic."

I guess it's a method of ensuring a "moral right" using the license.
I can understand why this would upset the Debian folks: not everybody
agrees that there is such a thing as moral rights, and others might
feel that moral rights are sufficiently protected outside copyright
law.

The biggest problem I see with invariant sections (I am still
undecided about moral rights), is that they can be misused. Of
course, it is up to Debian to allow GFDL-ed works into its catalog
that have invariant sections that do not contain "personal opinions".

--
branko collin
collin AT xs4all.nl




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