Development of Creative Commons licenses

[James Grimmelmann <james AT grimmelmann.net>]

Greg London wrote:
> As was just pointed out in the GPL discussion,
> the CC front page at http://creativecommons.org/  says:
> 
>> Creative Commons provides free tools that let
>> authors, scientists, artists, and educators
>> easily mark their creative work with the
>>
>> freedoms
>>
>> they want it to carry. You can use CC to change
>> your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved"
>> to "Some Rights Reserved."
> 
> And as was demonstrated in the current discussion,
> people new to the world of FLOSS have taken this
> to imply that all CC licenses have something to
> do with Freedoms.
> 
> Can someone please change "freedoms" to "rights"
> in the above text?
> 
> NC and ND manage rights to the work, but there
> is no Freedom to a work under NC-ND. I get how
> everyone, including CC, likes to jump on the
> Freedom bandwagon, but Freedom with respect to
> copyright has an already-established meaning,
> and the above text is not respecting that context.

"Freedom" has many meanings.

There are the freedom from want, the freedom from fear, the freedom of
speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of religion, the freedom
of conscience, the freedom to copy, the freedom to adapt, the freedom to
redistribute, the freedom to travel, the freedom to marry, degrees of
freedom, sexual freedom, and many more.  Not every use of "freedom" must
comply with the way that term is used in free software.

Moreover, the Free Software Definition talks about "free" (adjective)
software having four "freedoms" (noun, plural).  Something under NC or
ND offers freedoms 0 and 2.  The Definition of Free Cultural Works
similarly discusses four distinct "freedoms" (noun, plural).  An NC or
ND work offers three out of four.  It's thus still accurate to talk
about marking something with some "freedoms" and not with others.  The
result will fall short of being genuinely "free," but this is not an
abuse of the word "freedom."

James