Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Thursday 24 March 2005 02:18 pm, Peter Knupfer, H-Net wrote:
> Greg London wrote:
> > Peter Knupfer, H-Net said:
> >>These are fairly serious issues for scholars who are sharing documents
> >>or putting up preprints that can be snatched and inserted into
> >>anthologies in ways that distort the original work's meaning.
> >>
> >>
> >>the CC license can have a significant chilling effect on the sharing of
> >> some works -- especially culturally-sensitive or highly emotional
> >> materials.
> >
> > Two strong assertions. Do you have any example?
> > Not a hypothetical example, but a real-world example
> > where Moral Rights somehow saved the day?
> >
> > My current feeling towards moral rights is that they are
> > even worse than Fair Use from a gotta-go-to-court-to-sort-it-out
> > point of view.
> >
> > I assume we're talking about more than an author being
> > able to demand their name be taken off of a derivative,
> > and more about an author stopping someone from distributing
> > a derivative that the author doesn't like.
>
> I'm talking about a collective, not a derivative, work.

This is interesting, could a short story licensed CC BY-SA be inscluded in a 
book of short stories that were "all rights reserved" or som other license?
>
> Context matters, and context is the essence of moral rights.  It gives
> meaning to otherwise isolated information and affects the reputation
> and, sometimes, credentials, of a work's creator.  Nor is this about the
> extent to which moral rights "saves the day."  

Forgive me, I don't often consider moral rights. The main example that sticks 
in my head when thinking moral rights is that I could not buy a statue from 
you and paint it. Things along these lines.

> Moral rights, like fair 
> use, is a euphemism for a set of attitudes about how one's ideas are
> germinated and used, and if people believe that such rights are not
> available to them, they will be disinclined to share.  If, however,
> moral rights are available to them, they could be more inclined to share
> because at least they have recourse in extreme circumstances.

And, if this is so,  a problem with moral rights is that you have to go to 
court to see where you stand. Personally, I don't want to risk going to 
court.
>
> E.g:
>
> -- the author of the best short defense of the Japanese forced
> relocation in World War II refused to permit its use in a second edition
> of a reader, because she felt the entirety tipped too much against her
> point of view.  Under the CC license, she could not prevent its reuse in
> the collection.

Depends, if they used the SA option, would the people using it have been 
willing to use the same license. I think SA can provide a strong protection 
against a lot of people in this way.
>
> -- Peggy Lipstadt has just withdrawn permission from C-SPAN to broadcast
> a lecture on Holocaust Denial because C-SPAN intended to "balance" it
> with a lecture by a Holocaust denier.  Those seeking "credibility" for
> propositions considered absurd by the professionals and reasonable
> people desperately want these kinds of "problems in" recognitions.

Again SA may have been enough to work in this instance. Yes? No?
>
> -- Anti-apartheid activists who record oral histories of their
> participation in the struggle, find out that the tapes are being
> streamed from a website run by their former jailers from the old regime.
>   Like the classic bait and switch to attract users to web sites, the
> creators of the web site are using the tapes to draw traffic to a web
> site that is positively repulsive to the interviewees.  Under the CC
> license, what recourse do they have?

Could SA have helped here? They are taking your wordss to use against you, 
but 
because of SA you can take their words to use gainst them or to at least 
clarify things.
>
> -- the author of a work in progress posts it to a paper server for a
> comment period, covered by CC BY-NC-ND.  Another user incorporates the
> paper, with attribution, into an anthology to be given away online, and
> gets the credit for moving the original into full publication first.
> The original author's hopes of developing the paper into a chapter or
> section of an upcoming book are therefore influenced by this immediate
> reuse of her material.  Moral of the tale: don't share works in progress.

A couple of things for clarification...

Was the anthology NC? I notice no SA. (This Q is especially for Greg London - 
Greg, would this be a reasonable use of NC-SA in your mind?)

The person getting the credit in your example could have only gotten credit 
for moving another author's draft into full publication first. But what is 
full publication? Paper? After all, the author put it in public first.

Why would the public want to help someone else improve a CC BY-NC-ND paper 
anyway. Other than just to be nice, which is valid.

I feel a lot of these problems we envision are the result of the newness of 
the licenses and what that means to and how they modify business as usual.
>
> In some cases, if the no-derivatives is in effect, the copyright holder
> might attempt to claim that such uses are indeed derivatives and
> therefore prohibited, but that's a stretch.
>
> My problem in these examples, is not that the refusal of permission is
> justified -- Holocaust deniers will never listen to anybody, but the
> audience needs to see their views rebutted.  But Jeffersonian
> rationalism is but a theory when stacked up against human nature.  

This part is true but the problem is that it cuts both ways.

> My 
> problem is that the CC license could have a chilling effect on the
> willingness to publish and share in the first place, and that important
> works will not be available to the audiences that might benefit most
> from them.

And moral rights will have a chilling effect on me and people who think like 
me. It is too risky to build on someone else's work and have the chance of 
them taking me to court. What is to prevent them from objecting to my 
derivative becasue they fear it is way better than their original and they 
don't want the competition? Or they don't like my opinion as to the true 
terminal velocity of the African Barn Swallow?

If they have these concerns and CC chills them they can always release "all 
rights reserved" - what benefits would CC bring to these people? One of the 
beauties I see in the GPL is that it allows even people who hate each other 
to work together to their mutual benefit. I am a bit of an optomist and think 
that these sorts of working together can perhaps lead ot bigger things in 
some situations.


all the best,

drew