Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Kat Walsh" <kat AT wikimedia.org>]

On 4/25/07, Elad Wieder <ewieder AT creativecommons.org.il> wrote:
> Since copyright laws prevent by default any freedoms from any user (but for
> the fair-use exception, which becomes narrower every day), even a
> CC-BY-NC-ND license gives the user (or some users) freedoms the didn't have
> otherwise. It may not be the scope of freedom we would like them to have,
> but it's freedom none the less, and should not be underestimated.
>
> Now, when somebody comes and claims ownership on the work "freedom", as if
> it was his certificate to grant - this contradicts the very sense of "Free
> as in free speech".

There's something different between saying "this word means what I say
it does" and "you are using this word in a way that conflicts with
what other people say it means." (Including a longer-established and
closely-related group...) To say this restricts your free speech is
nonsense; don't confuse your freedom (there's that word again) to
express yourself in your preferred fashion, with having it without
others having the same freedom to tell you that they think your usage
is misleading.

Terms become useless if you don't know what people mean by them when
they say them; it frustrates many of our causes when everyone is using
"freedom" in a different way. ("What do you mean I can't use my NC-ND
picture on your site? It's under a free Creative Commons license!"
"What do you mean, I can't alter your digital artwork? You told me it
was free.")

(Even outside of the FSF crowd, my unscientific opinion gleaned from
answering the Wikimedia mailbags is that the general population -- you
know, people who don't argue about content licensing over dinner --
thinks of "freedom" in licensing as basically "public domain"; NC and
ND don't make the cut.)

I agree that granting users, say, only the right to redistribute, is
granting more freedom than they originally had, in that it releases
them from some of the restrictions of copyright. But I'd rather not
dilute the term "freedom" by using it in several contradictory ways,
some of which indicate very little freedom indeed.

And in this case it's not accurate. You're not marking a work with the
freedoms you want it to carry, you mark it with the restrictions you
want it to carry. There's nothing wrong with that, but call it what it
is rather than introduce confusion.

(Now, here's the obligatory plug for freedomdefined.org, which is
trying to address the problem of standardizing what "freedom" means in
content licenses... and not coincidentally, making it closely
analogous to free software.)

-Kat

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