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cc-licenses - [cc-licenses] Yet more on NC (was: Re: New Generic and ports)

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen AT iki.fi>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [cc-licenses] Yet more on NC (was: Re: New Generic and ports)
  • Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:08:23 +0300

On Oct 10, 2006, at 09:39, Jonathon Blake wrote:

One organization has a policy of using your local process server as
your first notification of a possible copyright violation. Several
others are well known for their enforcement of alleged copyright
infringement.

Makes you want to quote the KJV, doesn't it?

Something like that will evolve when people figure out what a creative
commons for _text_ means.

Software documentation needs to evolve with the software. Educational materials can evolve over time and be collaborative. I can imagine that religious commentary could be collaborative in a wiki style.

The best current example is Wikipedia, and its relatives.

And they are not NC.

Copy edits and translations are probably the only significant
derivatives for text.

And updated versions of software documentation and educational materials. And audiobooks. And movies. (An organization here in Finland that desires to become the monopoly ARR licensor of books for purposes other that the initial printing also talks about PowerPoint slides.)

My personal experience has been more of both of those for the
CC-BY-NC-SA than the CC-BY-SA licenced material.

If the text is NC, the translator has a hard time making money. That's not cool.

For non-profits, the revenue model is not the primary function.
My sense is that most organizations that us the NC licence are either
non-profits,

Surely it has to be an important consideration if the monopoly of potentially making money off the work is held. If it weren't, why should a non-profit care about someone else making a profit?

* Software support can generate revenue. That doesn't exist for text.

It seems to me that teaching courses based on textbooks is a support- like service for text.

Considering what kind of software license is known as "the MIT license" and that potential MIT authors are primarily in the business of providing the teaching service, I find it strange that MIT is pushing NC and all the ambiguity it entails.

NC prevents others from building business on what is potential usefulness for others but unused surplus for the licensor--or any attempt degenerates to the permission culture.

I haven't done a survey of the type of material that is slapped with
an NC licence.

Flickr has lots and lots of NC photos. I'd bet that most photographers did not take the photos because they were motivated by potential royalties but instead took the photos for personal enjoyment. Hence, any usefulness to anyone else is surplus.

There are also lots and lots of blog posts out there that have NC slapped on them but whose writers were not motivated by potential royalties.

Most of what I've seen has either been educational, or
religious orientated. In both instances,
the only restriction is selling the derivative product --- if there is one.

At e.g. Helsinki University of Technology, hard copies of course material is sold to students. This operation has been externalized to a privatized company that was previously the government printing office. (Often the parts of the material written by the lecturer are available to the world free as in beer on the Web and you would be allowed to print it on your home printer but not on the university printers. It isn't about collecting royalty to the lecturer.)

This means that NC is a problem for educational material. To me, it seems to make more sense to get rid of NC than to weasel it so that doing business with NC is OK for educational purposes.

You are assuming that income generation is the driving force behind
the selection of the NC licence. I'm not convinced that it is.

No, I am assuming that a knee-jerk desire to deny income generation for others is the driving force for the selection of NC.

For
both educational and religious material, the driving force is to
maximize the distribution, at the lowest cost to the original author,
and the end user. [This gets back to the dual licence: "All Rights
Reserved" for the hard copy, and "NC" for the e-text.]

If a tenured educator is paid on a monthly basis, one has to wonder if the royalty extracted outweighs the collaboration and distribution that is lost due to not being Free as in Free Software.

For a commentary on _The Gospel of
Judas of Keiroth_, the insight it provides are going to be more
important than the licence.

But could such commentary be massively collaborative under CC-by-sa? Could such a commentary be more insightful?

ND is as restrictive as NC, perhaps more so.

ND is restrictive in a different way, but even RMS agrees that ND makes sense for some works like expressions of political opinion. (I believe that many bloggers who are using CC-by-nc had reasons that should have lead to CC-by-nd instead.)

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen AT iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/






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