Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> 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.

Well, it's based in part in an understanding of human psychology.
Why do people contribute to a Free project?
The answer seems to reflect a notion that most people who contribute
to Free projects don't want to contribute their time and energy to
something that is restricted as much as CC-NC is.

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

Hm. Well, that would be interesting. Can it be proven?
The existence of large Free projects and the non existence of
similarly scaled non-free projects doesn't actually prove your point.
You might actually be trying to prove a negative here, which doesn't
work. Proving that
"NonCommercial does NOT produce an effective commons"
is tricky.

The nonexistence doesn't prove they can't exist.

I suppose the thing you'd have to do is poll a bunch of
randomly selected people and present them with the notion
of a Free project and a NonFree project, and see which
would they contribute to if all other things were equal.

That would at least tell you the likelyhood of NC project
succeeding where a Free project wouldn't, in today's population.
That could change in a few years, though.

I think the only way you can "prove" this is via a few
thought experiments, but maybe that's the "theory"
you were talking about. You'd have to make some assumptions,
though.

First, what is an "effective" project? Lots
of generations of derivations, is the answer I'd probably
give. The original work goes through many iterations
from many different contributers as it grows, evolves,
and improves. An effective commons project is "deep".

What sort of people would contribute to a "deep" project?
It would seem to point to a sort of person who wants their
contribution to survive for many generations and many
derivations, without restrictions adding up every derivative.
And it would seem to point to a sort of person who would
want their contribution to "win" as it were, in the notion
of battle-of-the-projects.

Linux used to talk about putting microsoft out of business.
Literally out of business. But I think the real "win" that
this pionted to was the idea that Linux would be a better,
more stable, more functional, operating system than Windows.

Wikipedia talks about putting encyclopedia's out of business.
But I think the notion is the same, in that folks want their
contributions to create something that is the best.

Folks aren't generally motivated to contribute their time
and energy to make the -second- best project on the planet.
There has to be something about it that makes the project
better than whatever other options might be available.
If the alternatives are better in every way, why spend
your time on it?

This would then mean that eventually, the project would
need to compete with similar projects on a commercial
basis. Linux would eventually want someone like RedHat
selling it. Wikipedia contributers would probably want
to see their contributions being rolled into something
that a vendor can sell that's better than anything by
Brittannica.

If you can't take your project into commercial space,
you can't compete against the alternatives. Which means
to contribute to a NonCommercial project, you must be
willing to see your contribution -NOT-EVER- become the
best in that field.

Now, this next bit seems to be the clincher.

For every NonCommercial project you can create,
someone else can always create a completely Free version.

If someone creates an NC project and it starts getting
contributers to it, odds are that someone else will
create a Free version and attract a larger base of
contributers.

If your NC project isn't paying people to contribute,
then their only incentive is the eventual payoff the
project will have if it succeeds. And any payoff an NC
project can have, a Free project can do better.
Which means all otehr things being equal, a Free
project wll do better than an NC one.

Which means that people who are willing ot contribute
are going to contribute to teh Free project for the
most part, and a small minority may contribute to the
NonCommercial one.

If you are paying your people to contribute, then
that might be another way to drive it, but it isn't
really a commons type project anymore.

Now, the only other bit is whether a Free version of
a project neccessarily rules out a NonCommercial
version of a similar project. At least on a similar
scale. And it seems that people who contribute to
such projects contribute to the ones with the biggest
payoff. And Free has a bigger payoff than NC.

Which means that while it maybe possible to have a
NonCommercial project that is "successful",
it would also seem to indicate that a Free version
of a similar project will always be -more- successful
than the NC one.