Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Hi all,

Okay, several people on this list (including me) are quite vocal in
claiming that NC terms are harmful to the mechanisms of the commons. In
other words, the claim is that they are either "do not produce a
commons" or "produce an ineffective commons". This is mostly based on
theory, though.

Now I want to prove it. You know, with *evidence*. ;-)

No facile "well it's not 'free' so it's not in the 'commons'" word
games. I need actual empirical evidence that NC (including NC-SA) works
do not get reused, improved, disseminated, etc. as efficiently as By or
By-SA works do.

How can we measure this?

Note that this is *not* the "license confusion" issue I'm talking about
here. I'm talking about the direct consequences of choosing an NC
license -- the reason why Wikipedia would bomb if it tried to use NC
licensing, or rather, evidence that attempts to build a commons around
NC material are not successful.

Of course, if you have evidence to the contrary, that is equally valuable.

Thanks!

Cheers,
Terry


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