Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell AT gmail.com>]

On 2/25/07, Javier Candeira <javier AT candeira.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I am against extending the concept of derivativeness for the same reason
> Strenghtening copyleft by creating more rights (or extending the reach of
> those rights) is solving the wrong problem. The more we lower the bar for
> "derivativeness" or "related works" or whatever the legal term, the more we
> strenghten copyright, and with it the grasp of the copyright cartel over
> culture.

Copyright cartel? Gosh.  ... and I'm usually the one with the over
dramatic rhetoric.

Is that what this is really all about?  "Waaa.. I want to make
worthless mashups of non-free commercial content so lots of people
will read my blog!" ?

Please. Get over it.  Copyright is a reality today. It's easy to argue
that it is excessively restrictive, but it's hard to argue that it
provides no value at all.

Fortunately, we can work together within the system to create a wealth
of free content which is largely free of bad copyright restrictions.
Once we have succeeded, people will have a choice. They can built a
community and its culture around heavily encumbered works, they can
built a community and culture around free works, or they can do
something in between. I think this is a beautiful and fair goal which
everyone from the single hobbyist author to your "Copyright cartel"
boogieman should be able to support.

I think it's unfortunate that you seem to be instead advocating a
forceful reduction in copyright protection, simply because you don't
have enough confidence that the folks making free content will be
successful in creating a real alternative. It might be excusable if
there were any realistic proposition for it to work, but I fail to see
how using weak terms in CC-by-sa is going to have any impact on the
courts decisions related to the ability to enforce copyright
restrictions over random Japanese cartoons.

[snip]
> The way you and Erik want it to work, readers
> would not have less exposure to by-sa photos and their authors, as
> commercial non-free newspapers would not be able to print them. Commercial
> non-free newspapers would also have less freedom to print and use those
> photos according to the wishes of their authors.

Speaking as one author, I don't want non-free newspapers using my free
images in non-free articles. I release my works under a copyleft
license because I want them to help expand the pool of freely licensed
works. My 'payment' for using my image in a derived work is that the
work be free. If they aren't happy with the terms of that arrangement,
I am glad to consider other ones.

There are *so* many works created today where the author has no
serious expectation of making a substantial profit which would be
inhibited by the release their work under a free license... yet they
do not free their work "just in case". By having a large pool of
copylefted content that they can build from we create an incentive to
free their work, an incentive which they would not have had otherwise.

Every day I benefit from material which would not be free without this
essential property of copyleft licenses.

The fact that a downstream user must keep their work free is clearly
embodied in the words "share alike", so it's no wonder that many
people thought the CC SA term actually required people to share the
work which they built on a SA work under an equivalent license. "I
give you this image and you can build on it, but you must
share-alike". *Sigh*. Well, this isn't the first time, nor will it be
the last, that "CC" stood more for Creating Confusion than it stands
for anything to do with a commons.