Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Stephanie Rieger" <steph AT yiibu.com>]

Hello,

I’ve been following today’s debate about GFDL and interoperability, and am hoping to add a few comments from a downstream user perspective.

 

My company recently chose by-sa 2.5 as our primary license for content distribution. We chose Creative Commons specifically—over other licenses like GDFL—because it’s well known and its terms are relatively easy to follow—specifically for downstream users. In our case, we’re distributing content meant for a multitude of formats and devices (web, iPod, PlayStation Portable, smartphone etc.) and in formats where bits of the content might easily become separated from other bits—especially during sharing or reuse. While it is the downstream user’s responsibility (amongst other things) to “make clear to others the license terms of this work,” we wanted to keep this process as easy for them as possible. For this reason, licenses like the GDFL, that may mandate (in certain cases) the inclusion of a full “transparent copy” of the license, cover texts, and invariants—plus the mandatory 5-6 line blurb (“Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, etc.”) were not an option.

If the long-term aim is to increase the quantity and quality of liberally licensed works available to the general public, I think it’s important not to forget the use cases involved in the life of a piece of CC license content. Namely 1) the licensor (who needs to easily understand the license so a confident choice of license can be made) 2) the user who comes across the work, finds it interesting, and simply wants to redistribute it (ie. easily share it with friends or colleagues) and 3), the people who want to re-mix the work and need to incorporate the CC license requirements into their derivative works to provide attribution.

There are enough challenges to downstream users when passing on license information and providing attribution. A band recently went to the trouble of printing the license URI right on their record label, not everyone will go this far (even if it invalidates the license.) If openly licensed content is to become mainstream (i.e. usable by regular people, kids, students, teachers, businesses etc.) the terms of use have to remain very, very, easy—-at least for the core group of licenses. Someone recently commented that providing attribution for the full series of authors on a Wikipedia article wasn’t a big deal. I disagree. As much as I would love to attribute 10-20+ people it actually can be a big, complicated, deal with many types of media. Enough of a big deal that many may make the choice not to use that particular work. Add to that a longer, or more complex license and it could have a big effect on usage (two separate issues but they still amount to added complexity.) While there are massive amounts of work licensed CC at this stage, finding examples of reuse—outside the open source, music, and blogger communities—remains difficult (I’d love for someone to contradict me on that one so please do if you have examples—other than community created around BBC backstage and creative archive which is beginning to generate lots of stuff.) 

Imagine you’re a teacher wanting to use a poem on a one-page handout in the classroom, an elementary student wanting to incorporate song lyrics into a script for the Christmas pageant, an artist wanting to use a graphic on a t-shirt, a painter wanting to incorporate some text in a mixed media piece, a small business wanting to use some material for a brochure. Meeting certain GFDL license requirements under these circumstances can be a challenge. Yet it’s exactly these kinds of common, everyday, social, cultural and educational uses that open content should be enabling and enriching. 

The harder the licenses are to use, the more likely they will be ignored or abused (if simply through ignorance or misunderstanding.) So while I’m not suggesting we try to accommodate every conceivable use for a piece of content when implementing licenses, we should at least consider the realities faced by downstream users and their effect on the longevity and usefulness of the content. Additional license requirements—added for the sake of interoperability—seem likely to make the licenses harder to use; and in the long term this may be more detrimental to the movement than not being able to incorporate GFDL content.

 

(I’ll climb off my soapbox now ;-)

 

Kind regards,

Stephanie Rieger