Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Luis Villa wrote:
> Better yet, can there be a cc-licenses-offtopic or something similar
> that such discussions can preemptively be shunted to when they get
> repetitive, or of interest only to a few?

I'm sorry that the discussion has digressed away from the original
question, which was simply about *measuring* the claimed ill-effects of
NC licenses (the ones we critics like to cite when suggesting that NC is
bad for artists who want to get the benefit of commons-based production).

So far the legitimate answers I've gotten are:

* There is no data available

* The data that you *can* get is hopelessly skewed or otherwise useless
for answering the question

* There are no metrics ("you haven't defined the question well enough")

* There may be data, but no controls -- i.e. you can't find evidence of
project A using SA licenses and project B using NC licenses which are
trying to do the same thing

And of course, LOTS of illegitimate answers, such as:

* You're asking the wrong question!

* I have redefined the terms so the answer is a truism! Clever me!

* It's not *about* ill effects, it's about *ethics*!

I guess it's only natural when you ask a scientific question on a legal
mailing list. ;-)

So far, it's rather a pathetic showing. In short, it appears that the
claims against NC have little empirical basis. It's all either ideology
or theoretical hand-waving about bad effects that might happen, but
which have not (yet?) left any trace to point at.

That makes the case against NC extremely weak, IMHO. There's little
basis for objectively evaluating one opinion against another.

The best I can do at this point is make general observations about the
fact that there is no NC-licensed equivalent to Wikipedia (but is that
because it wouldn't work, or because the founder didn't like NC?).

Of course, you can argue that the choices made by site owners reflect
their intelligence about what the effects would be (IOW, you don't have
to jump off of a cliff to know it will hurt, so there is much less
empirical evidence of cliff-jumpers. Also, they are dead, so less likely
to report their success or failure rate).

The biggest counter-example is ccMixter. However, it is not entirely
clear that it represents anything significant since it doesn't *allow*
SA licensing and since most contributions appear to be directly related
to various license-specific contests (thus, direct pecuniary rewards
skews the market away from its natural behavior).

This isn't totally useless for my project, but it does mean I'm going to
have to take a very different tack than I had hoped to with the issues
around non-commercial licensing.

However, I haven't seen anything that I would consider "off-topic". We
are discussing license terms for cc-licenses and their effects. I can't
think of any better place to discuss those issues than on cc-licenses.

Note in particular that the full name for this list is
"Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" -- IOW, not merely
on the published licenses (what they are) but on their evolution and
terms (what they should be).

Dull or not, ISTM that's what this list is *for*.

Cheers,
Terry

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