Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On 4/25/07, Joachim Durchholz <jo AT durchholz.org> wrote:
 

> You *can* release NC and ND licensed stuff and to the public a service.
> It's just less of a service than releasing it without the NC and ND
> burdening.

 

Oh come on.

Anyone releasing someing under NC and/or ND is doing so

more for their personal benefit than for the benefit of the

community. Free samples so that people come and buy more.

Or free samples so they get a chance of getting discovered

and someone comes in and publishes their work.

 

If you release something under SA or GNU-GPL or BSD or BY

then you are actually giving the community something more than

you are directly getting back.

 

copyleft et al are barn raising licenses.

NC and ND are types of commercial advertising,

guerrilla marketing, free samples, hype generators, etc.

 

 

> You say as if "proprietary" were a four-letter word.

No. That's what you and others keep misunderstanding.

I don't have a problem with proprietary works and licenses.

I have a problem with proprietary works and licenses being

described using the word "freedom".

 

I don't have a problem with all rights reserved,

my novel is All Rights Reserved.

 

But I don't slap CC-NC-ND-BY on it and try to tell people

I'm doing them some big favor. I don't do that and say

I'm giving them some "freedom".

 

OTOH I think that the outcome was a muddied terminology.
Even today, the FSF finds it necessary to repeat that it is "free as in
free speech, not free as in free beer"

 

If it is muddied, my objection is attempting to clear it up.

> But NC and ND are proprietary licenses. They are for the
> primary benefit of the creator. And when people talk about
> GNU-GPL and NC-ND as if they were all part of the same
> thing, when people say they want to use NC because it is
> "half-open" then people who've been around and know the difference
> are going to be telling you just how wrong you are.

I have yet to hear how wrong that would be.
I have read a lot of advocacy (and, of course, flamage by the usual
bunch of half-knowledgeable converts), but nothing substantial that I
could repeat to explain the issue to outsiders.

 

License break down into two simple categories.

The creator either licenses the work in such a way

that the community benefits as much as the creator.

OR the creator licenses the work in such a way

that the creator maintains an advantage over teh

community.

 

The first is about "Freedom", copyleft, public domain, etc.

The second is proprietary, all rights reserved, NC, ND, etc.

 

And proprietary isn't a four letter word.

But proprietary isn't "Free" either.

NC has nothing to do with Freedoms.

 

> See above. the floss software folks had spent years fighting
> over and eventually sorting out what "Free" meant.

No. They simply established a definition of "Free" that met their
intentions, so that they could use an extremely positive terminology to
describe their goals. It's just PR.

That's just dismissing their definition so you can ignore it and insert your own.

Which is a fancy way of saying you reserve the right to make a word mean

whatever YOU want it to mean, and to hell with all the work anyone has done

before you.

 

 

 

> I see three important points in the spectrum here:
> * Closed, i.e. "all rights reserved".
> * Free use ("free beer", "freeware"). As in CC's ND clause.
> * Modification allowed and possible. As in the GPL, or a CC without ND.

 

Absolutely not.

THere is closed and open. Free and Proprietary. that's it.

You either enable the creator more than the community,

or you enable the community as an equal to the creator.

NC and ND and ARR are all proprietary, closed.

The creator retains the majority rights to the work.

The creator alone can sell the work.

The creator alone can modify the work.

And in a world where transmission of the work is a sunk cost

over the internet, giving people the right to transmit the work

for free isn't giving them much at all.You're just giving them the

right because of the potential benefit it may bring to you.

 

Advertising.

 

 

> Freedoms start exactly at the points where the others' rights end. So
> anything that's about managing rights is also about managing freedoms.
>
> IOW "rights, not freedoms" is just a slogan, not an argument.

 

 

Sure. If it's just a slogan and the words are equal,

 

then it shouldn't harm you to change the words.

 

But that argument is a smoke screen.

The words aren't equal to you.

One has more emotional pull to it than the other.

one implies more than the other.

one makes it sound like you're doing more for the users

than the other.

 

And you want that, even though the word has a very

specific and entirely different meaning in the history

of the entire FLOSS commnity.