Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Jonathon Blake" <jonathon.blake AT gmail.com>]

Luis wrote:

> think the most powerful reason for this is that in an NC commons,
only the original creator has a commercial motivation to contribute to
the commons. Every other contributor must be motivated by some other,
often less powerful, motivation.

I see four distinctly different groups using NC licences:
* Projects orientated around religious themes.
* Projects using it as a publicity stunt, knowing that the alleged
users won't be able to use it;
* The default licence is NC, and hence their material is NC. [ Blogs,
ccMixer, etc];
* The user who doesn't understand what the NC grants, and does not grant;

The first group puts a strong emphasis upon distribution being gratis.
Reworking/reusing material is standard operating practice.

I'll skip the second group, except to say that this is an example of
using a CC licence as a weapon designed to restrict user's rights.

The third group might be interested in a libre culture, but doesn't
know how to get there.

The fourth group is operating out of ignorance;

> In a liberally licensed world, many, many people have a potential strong 
> commercial motivation to contribute to the commons.

I might be wrong, but I suspect that the only group that will develop
a significant NC commons will be that first group --- religious
orientation.

> I disagree with Greg's suggestion that this is psychological; if people 
> didn't want to contribute under restrictive licenses then the BSD and Apache 
> licenses would be much more common than they currently are. They aren't, so 
> we have to look for non-psychological reasons.

> someone with a game theory or organization theory background.)

One significant factor that needs to be examined, is "gratis" as a
motivating force.

######

Getting back to Terry's question, how "harmful" the NC licence,depends
upon what result one is seeking.

On a personal note, I've come to the conclusion that the NC licence
should either be scrapped, or replaced with one that makes the
"gratis" part of it much more explicit, and clearly defined. Between
the wording on the CC Guidelines, and wording of the NC licence, the
only reliable thing to say, is that it is a confusing mess.  Very few
people, or projects survive when things are not clear.

xan

jonathon