Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Tuesday 13 February 2007 06:57 pm, tomislav medak wrote:
> jonathon wrote:
> > tomislav medak wrote:
> >> What would be the benefit of such a meta button?
> >
> > it would make it easier for people to tell if something was free or not.
>
> it seems to me that we would get again a confusion if we would create a
> free and non-free category, which would produce a somewhat similar,
> though ideologically quite different effect we had when all licenses
> were under one brand - CC license. for two reasons:
>
> first reason would be: how do you define 'free'?, or rather 'freedoms',
> or 'free enough' to be called that.

Well, let's start here:

http://creativecommons.org/

This quote is from right near the top of the page:

"We're a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we 
create — is free."

So, first off, do they mean libre or gratis?

Now we find at this link:

"Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative 
and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian."

and:

"Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's GNU General 
Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application 
that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or 
retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on 
certain conditions."

So, it might be reasonable to look here:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

They list four freedoms.

Which have easy parallels to non-code and which dont?

freedom 2 looks easy - freedom to redistribute copies.
freedom 3 looks fairly easy - freedom to make and distribute derivatives?
freedom 0 - freedom to use the work for any purpose?
freedom 1 - freedom to make private derivatives?


> for instance, freedom to share 
> licensed works is given by all standard CC licenses and it is a freedom.
> it really comes down to defining what freedoms constitute a free license
> and how you weigh the author freedoms as against the freedoms of users.
> this is a much more fundamental debate.

Well, Free software is about the freedom of the users and not of the authors. 
Is there are problem with this approach?
>
> and yet we can agree on a certain definition/understanding of 'free' -
> DFSG's, FSF's, freedomdefined's, Wikipedia's and they all seem
> normatively coherent when compared to NC or ND licenses. but as long as
> CC decides to stay agnostic as to what constitutes 'free (enough)', this
> will remain subject to dispute.

Why does CC need to remain agnostic as to what licenses it offers would pass 
muster according to the Free software guidelines and which wouldn't? Why is 
it not good enough for them that they remain agnostic as to which licenses 
they offer to authors and maintina?
>
> second reason would be: 'free' is a lot less precise in practical terms
> than BY and BY-SA, and 'non-free' is yet again a lot more less precise
> than BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, etc. this would be a step back from what we have
> gained with new buttons.

I disagree with this. Having a classification for mamals within animals is 
not 
a step back from only havings animals, dogs, cats, mice, etc.
>
> i really understand the problem with the example you give, but someone
> creating FLOSS should really know better than confuse ND with free
> software.

That is not the only area of concern. Do a search for copyleft on youtube and 
look at the "license details" that are on some of those works. The clarity is 
being diluted rapidly to the detriment of all in my view.
>
> creating clarity for some might imply creating confusion for others.

Well, here again is the quote at the top:


"We're a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we 
create — is free."

English has this problem with free. Is it libre or gratis. This is important 
to know. Does no one at CC have the background in Free Software to get this 
and take it into account.

Is everything they do libre, gratis, or both?
>
> best,
>
> tom

all the best,

drew
-- 
(da idea man)