Development of Creative Commons licenses

[James Grimmelmann <james AT grimmelmann.net>]

Greg London wrote:
> 
> 
> On 4/25/07, *James Grimmelmann* <james AT grimmelmann.net
> <mailto:james AT grimmelmann.net>> wrote:
> 
>     CC has adopted the word "freedom" because it is both accurate according
>     to this very old meaning and has positive (and appropriate) emotional
>     associations.  The way in which CC is using the word is not identical to
>     the precise ways in which FSF uses it.  That difference does not
>     necessarily mean that anyone is being dishonest, or confusing, or
>     manipulative. 
> 
>  
> Uh huh.
>  
> So, when creative COMMONS picked the name COMMONS
> and started the website with pictures of cows grazing in
> a COMMONS, that wasn't confusing? That was a honest
> and accurate representation of what CC was all about?
>  
> Because I still have a problem with fact that creative COMMONS
> has as its most commonly used license CC-NC-blah.

"Common" is a very interesting word.  It comes form the same Greek word
that gives us commune and community.  Many of the modern meanings seem
to have come into English at about the same time.  In the fourteenth
century it was used as a noun meaning" the common people," as a synonym
for "community," and as an adjective meaning "common to all mankind" or
"shared in common," among other meanings.  In the fifteenth century, it
was used, often with an "s" at the end, to describe common land -- that
belonging to all the members of a community together, not divided into
individual parcels.  Sometimes, the land itself was privately owned, but
others in the community had the right to enter and graze cattle ("common
of pasture"), or dig up turf ("common of turbary"), or cut firewood
("common of estovers").

With the enclosure movement, the "commons" became a more politically
loaded term.  Landowners who erected fences and expelled others became
wealthy.  "The commons" referred not just to the common access to land
but to an idea of what had been lost more generally: a tradition of
solidarity, of production for the community rather than for the market,
and for a greater scope of individual freedom.

In this century, two great intellectual movements have taken up the
banner of the commons.  The first is the environmental movement.
Hardin's phrase "tragedy of the commons" was a warning against the
commons: we need private property or government regulation to prevent
environmental catastrophe.  Later scholars have turned that idea on its
head, demonstrating how community management of resources can often
result in wise stewardship that coexists with well-managed sharing.
Indeed, these forms of common ownership often outperform property and
regulation.  This observation is tied to a broader claim; many forms of
indiscriminate property rights are environmentally toxic, because the
property rights fail to include the consequences for "the commons" --
those things that all humanity depends on.  This is not the "commons" of
successful common ownership; it is a very different animal that shares a
name and part of an intellectual history.

The second great movement is the information revolution.  Scholars and
creators have recognized, in many different domains, the value of
sharing as form of exchange and production.  If I freely give my ideas
away, others can build on them, and all I have cast away will be
returned a hundredfold.  This point works for software, for art, for
education, for reference works, for news, and for much more.  It works
because information can be shared and replicated without consuming it,
so there is often no need to give people proprietary rights over it in
order to prevent them from wasting it.  The idea of the "commons" thus
has become a way of explaining that information is being shared, and not
hoarded.

"Commons" has a riot of different meanings in there today.  If you talk
to an economist doing fieldwork with common-ownership communities, with
an environmental ecologist, with an Internet artist, or with a
free-software-minded lawyer, you will get four very different
definitions of what makes something a "commons."  "Commons" works as a
term in part because all of them can mean something different by it and
yet still know that they are part of a shared enterprise.

Creative "Commons" keys off a great many of those meanings.  James Boyle
would emphasize the link to environmentalism -- we're saving our
intellectual environment from pollution and enclosure.  Artists would
point to the possibility of giving away parts of their work in the
spirit of generosity and liberation.  Some lawyers would note that CC
licensing creates a body of work for which no legal permission is
required for use.  Some people might point to the resonance with the
social value of the old ideals that no one could be kept away from the
commons, which was always available for the community.

None of these meanings are wrong.

James