Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <greglondon.1 AT gmail.com>]

On 4/25/07, Elad Wieder <ewieder AT creativecommons.org.il> wrote:

As being such a freedom fighter, can't you give CC people the

freedom to interpret the word "freedom"?

 

No. I do not subscribe to the humpty-dumpty mentality that a word

means whatever someone wants it to mean.

 

And I'm having issue with the first line of the first page of the

Creative Commons website trying to shoehorn itself into being

something that it isn't, or try to shoehorn its licenses into doing

something they don't.

 

You cannot simply swap "rights" assigned through copyright

with the word "Freedom". There is no reason to do so other

than to (1) shoehorn into the FSF defintion of Freedom or

(2) bootstrap into the emotive meaning of Freedom.

In either case, neither is accurate.

 

If it's (1), then its purposely misleading, trying to present itself

as being the non-software equivalent to the FSF or something.

 

If it's (2), then its purposely using emotive, misleading,

and subjective terms to encourage people to interpret

"Freedom" to mean something far more than what

is legally and definitively accurate. i.e. "rights".

 

Anyone who says the words mean exactly the same:

then all the more reason to change it to "rights".

If you say they really do mean exctly the same thing,

then why the hell can't you change it?

Because you don't really think they mean the same thing,

that's why. You're just giving lip service to them being

"separate but equal" to attempt to minimize the differences.

But there are differences. They are not equal.

 

If you insist they mean exactly the same thing to you,

then change it. Because it won't make any difference

to you at all, will it? And it will make a huge difference

to those of us who hold the words to the meanings that

have been given them.

 

Greg