Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Rob Myers wrote:
>  The problem is that if you look at CC usage, NC is the most popular
>  license module.

Most people appear to think that CC-By-NC = Creative Commons License, 
based on the way the words are used in press releases, webpages, etc.

Furthermore, I think it has to be realized that "most popular" is in no 
way related to "best". The most popular license is ARR, by a long, long 
margin.  It might be argued that the fact that NC continues to be the 
most popular module is a major evidence of the failing of CC to 
communicate the problems with it (i.e. CC promotes NC because it's the 
most popular, but it's the most popular because CC promotes it).

And while I know there *are* people who use NC advisedly, I also think 
there are people who think, "Oh, 'non-commercial', that sounds good -- 
it's not like I plan to make any money from it" (irony intended, yes).

I had a brief email exchange with the guy who started freesound.org 
(Bram de Jong) after I found out that his website, which collects 
*samples* of *sounds* is almost all licensed under "CC Sampling +".   
Now, of course, "Sampling" is actually a terrible license for samples of 
music -- it's purpose is to allow you to *make* samples from longer 
works (a sample of a sample has got to be pretty darned short).  But 
it's easy to see how that mistake was made.  (Apparently, he's planning 
to deprecate this choice in favor of By or By-NC).

I think also that people are cynically used to associating "commercial" 
with "exploitative", so what they're really saying is "I don't want to 
be exploited".  Personally, I think that By-SA is a better way to avoid 
exploitation, but I don't think it's as obvious as it should be that it 
is a good choice for that.

Cheers,
Terry

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