Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

drew Roberts wrote:
>  On Monday 05 June 2006 12:22 pm, Nancy Ide wrote:
> > Creative Commons licenses are causing us a big problem.
>  I either don't understand what you are doing, or how the CC licenses
>  could cause you a problem.
>
> > We are creating a 100 million word corpus of American English texts
> > produced since 1990 (the American National Corpus -- http://
> > AmericanNationalCorpus.org), intended to be comparable to the
> > British National Corpus of British English. We go to the web to
> > find texts that can be included in the corpus
>
>  Are you talking all of those unmarked, but by default "all rights
>  reserved" copyright texts out there in the wild?
>
>  If you can use those withoug contacting the copyright holders for
>  permission, as a fair use, I would think you could apply the same
>  fair use no matter what the license. (I am not a lawyer and that is a
>  guess.)

Well, IANAL either, but I am absolutely sure of this. This "problem"
has nothing to do with CC licensing.  Either all of the material on
the web can be used under fair use for this project, or it can't.

If it can't, then Creative Commons' "By" license is one of a handful
of non-copyleft free licenses that makes this project possible at
all.

> > --especially fiction, but also blogs and anything else we can
> > find--often looking for Creative Commons licensed material. The
> > problem is, the "default" CC license most authors choose includes
> > "share-alike" and "non-commercial use". These two restrictions
> > make it impossible for us to include the data in the ANC, since (a)
> > the ANC is used by publishers of dictionaries and
> > English-as-a-second-language texts, who use the corpus to search
> > for linguistic patterns and word usages, which is therefore a
> > commercial use; and (b) the viral "share-alike" restriction means
> > we have to let anyone else use the materials under the same
> > license, and this would violate our strict usage requirements for
> > researchers and commercial enterprises.

Yes, non-commercial means non-commercial.  But why aren't you
complaining about all those "all rights reserved" book publishers?

As for the complaint about "sharealike", I find your desire to privatize
a public good deplorable, if that is in fact your aim. If it is not, then
I fail to understand why sharealike should be a problem for you (surely
your clients can analyze a copylefted work as well as one that isn't?)

In any case, authors use these licenses to protect their own will in
their work. If you don't like the terms, then ask the authors for
permission, just as you would for any other copyrighted work.

If you were expecting the commons community to be just a bunch of
work "free for exploitation", then you have a serious misunderstanding
of the community.

Cheers,
Terry

(Who is neither a lawyer, nor a member of Creative Commons, but
an interested user of the CC-By-SA).

--
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com