Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Tuesday 13 February 2007 07:56 pm, Jonathon Blake wrote:
> On 2/13/07, tomislav medak wrote:
> > first reason would be: how do you define 'free'?, or rather 'freedoms',
> > or 'free enough' to be called that. for instance, freedom to share
> > licensed works is given by all standard CC licenses and it is a freedom.
>
> First, get rid of CC as a brand name. Keep the name for the
> organization, if you so desire.
>
> Debian Legal has a set of four definitions,and three tests that can be
> used to determine whether  or not something is "free". Anything which
> passes all of those criteria is "free".  Call that the _Free Content
> Licence_.
>
> The BY and BY-SA variants can be called the _Free Authors Licence_.
>
> BY-NC-ND can be relabelled as _The Usage is Banned Licence_

Not so sure this description fits. You can "use" such a book to read or as a 
door stop... ?

A bit off topic here... Is it legal for a for profit entity to download NC 
documents off of web sites?

My initial thought was, it must be, after all it is legal to download "all 
rights reserved" documents off of web sites.

Then I thought, perhaps it is more subtle than that. Finding an all rights 
reserved document on a public server of the entity holding the copyright to 
that documents might be taken as an implicit ok to download it.

Finding an NC document though? Here we have an up front notice that for 
profit 
entities / uses are not allowed.

Is this crazy?
>
> The other NC variants can be called _The Free Non Commercial Licence_.

Since this one would not pass the tests you point to above, I would suggest 
the word free not come into the name if we want to avoid confusion along 
those lines.

Do we needto bite the bullet and start using libre and gratis more?


> The other ND variants can be called  _Banned Derivatives Licence_
>
> Give each set of licences a distinctly different logo.  Not just
> different colours, but different shapes and motifs.   [Use a green
> dollar sign on a bronze circle for the ND variants. Use a gold circle
> on a purple square for the _Free  Non Commercial Licence_.  Use a
> black skull and cross bones on a  red triangle for _The Usage is
> Banned Licence_ Use a orange rectangle for the _Free Authors Licence_.
>  Use a pale blue  hexagon for the _Free Content Licence_. ]
>
> > 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.
>
> With the new icons one still has to go back to the licence,to
> determine which it is.
> [And it doesn't help that the search engines don't differentiate
> between the different licences.]
>
> > i really understand the problem with the example you give, but someone
> > creating FLOSS should really know better than confuse ND with free
> > software.
>
> I was surprised to see the NC-ND licence used within that project.
> Especially since the code was GNU GPL. But such things  are going to
> occur,until the CC brand name is history, having been replaced by at
> least six distinctly different licences,none of which have
> names,logos, or anything else that resemble the others in any way.

I am not convinced that the CC umbrella brand is a necessarily hurtful thing 
if there were to be a clear distinction between the Free and non-Free 
licenses. The association under the one umbrella might serve as an 
introduction / stepping stone.
>
> xan
>
> jonathon

all the best,

drew
-- 
(da idea man)