Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

>> What are you talking about? Of course a CC license transfers
>> some rights. Just not the rights that someone like
>> ASCAP would purchase.
>
> No, he's right there -- transferring rights means
> losing your own rights in the work. ... Licensing
> rights is always the better deal, and that's what CC
> licenses do

Oh good grief. I'm aware of the difference between
assigning copyright versus licenseing copyrights.
The FSF has a number of works that are *licensed* GPL
but FSF requires that contributers *assign* rights
to them. They were doing this long before CC came
around.

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright

But Dana and I weren't arguing about "assign" vs "license",
we were arguing *freedom* versus *rights*.

I said:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2007-April/005648.html
= The word "freedom" when used in blanket statements
= to discuss what CC is all about is confusing,
= misleading, and inaccurate. The word "rights" is
= far more accurate, does not mislead anyone, and
= does not confuse the purpose of something like
= CC-NC-ND-BY with something like GNU-GPL.


Dana replied:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2007-April/005651.html

+ The idea of granting "rights" is likely very
+ confusing for authors and artists who are used
+ to the world of traditional media licensing.
(snip)
+ There is a difference between "rights" and "freedoms."

So, Dana is saying that there is a difference between
rights and freedoms. that you "license freedoms" and
you "transfer rights".

That's a totally bogus distinction. Copyright doesn't
grant authors a list of exclusive rights and a list of
exclusive freedoms. Copyright grants authors some exclusive
rights, and they can license or transfer or do whatever
the hell they want with them. What they *do* wasn't the point.

The point was that they are all exclusive *rights*,
not exclusive "freedoms". Therefore, "freedom" is an
inappropriate and inaccurate term for CC to use when
talking about their licenses in general,
because some of their licenses have nothing to
do with freedom.

And my question to Dana still stands:

Show me how the first line of the front page of the
CC website is more accurate to say "freedom" than
"rights".

http://creativecommons.org/

show me that the line that 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."

is more accurate than saying CC provides tools
that let people license the rights to their work
or something to that effect.

No doubt, the language could be modified to some
alternative so that the result avoids the word
"freedom" and replaces it with the word "rights",
and it would be a much more accurate description.

Your suggestion is much more clear than the current
opening, and it is automatically clear that not all
CC licenses have anything to do with freedom.

# "CC licenses grant a range of non-exclusive rights
# to the public at large, in a modular way, ranging
# from near total control (By-NC-ND) to near total
# freedom (By)."

I don't care how it's worded. I just don't want the
word "freedom" used in an ambiguous and confusing way.

Greg