Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> "Can I use NC licensed images in a powerpoint presentation for work?"
>
> If the answer is a flat no, simply because the
> usage is applied in a commercial setting, that
> seems like the NC license isn't very effective.
>
> Why not create two NC attributes?
> One that covers any connection with
> commercial activity.  and one
> that covers resale specifically.

Well, two licenses would probably only add to the
confusion, but your suggestion hits the nail
on the head as to what the problem is:
Different people want NC for different reasons.

Some view NC as a way to implement free advertising
and free samples to increase sales. The issue then
becomes where to draw the line so that poeple can
pass your work around but you get any money that
can be gotten.  You said you don't mind some business
using your work as long as they don't sell it.
Others might view that as an opportunity to get
some income. Where should the line be drawn?
I don't think there's an empirical answer.

Others view NC as a way to codify what they view
as what "Fair Use" should really be. i.e. the
way the Grateful Dead encouraged people to tape
their concerts and similar such approaches,
as opposed to the current attempts by content
providers to completely kill off Fair Use to the
point that they want you to buy a copy of a song
for your house, and another for your car.

The problem with "Fair Use" is that it's a tricky,
fuzzy, legal term, that doesn't have any hard and
fast rules to it. Unfortunately, I think CC simply
shifted the issue slightly to the left, but left
the boundaries equally fuzzy with the term
"Commercial"

Then there are those who view NC as a way to
allow "fan fiction" legally. fans can create
derivatives, but can't sell them, etc.

Then there are those who have adopted NC as
the "Educational" license. This is probably
the biggest stretch to the NC umbrella license.
A University charging thousands of dollars in
tuition can use a NC work if they qualify as
a NonProfit organization. for example, the
MIT Open Courseware license is CC-NC-SA

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/terms-of-use.htm

There was a rather long and lengthy debate around
this, with some folks arguing that "money" has
nothing to do with "Education". And finally some
instructor came out and said they wouldn't mind
some professor at another university using their
work, but they wouldn't want some mail order school
charging money for their content.

Basically, the view is that there's
"money" and then there's "MONEY".
University money is OK.
Mail order MONEY is not OK.
Which becomes an irresolvable mess trying to
codify into a license, because, really, its a
totally arbitrary distinction.
We're good. They're bad.

There's one other fairly common use for NC:
Codifying the logical fallacy known as Argumentum ad lazarum

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html#lazarum

The idea that money is evil.

Some folks use NC because they want to release their
works under a NC license and they don't want their
work to get "dirtied" by money, or they don't want
"the man" to get their work and make money off of it.
There is no money that is "good" money, so it's all
forbidden.

So, you can see, there are a lot of different people
who make NC mean a lot of different things to them:

(1) free advertising/free samples to increase sales.
Problem: where do you draw the line that separates
"Free Sample" from "Missed Sale"?

(2) codifying a more relaxed approach to Fair Use.
Problem: The problem used to be "Fair Use" was
fuzzy. Now the problem is that "NonCommercial" is fuzzy.

(3) separating educational "money" and educational MONEY.
Having done some corporate training, I find the
notion of University=>OK. Corporate Trainer=>Not OK.
to be completely capricious and arbitrary.
But, hey, the universities found a way to circle the
wagons for their own benefit, and that's their priority.

(4) imposing a "money is evil" viewpoint on the world.
I can find no rational basis to this, so I can't explain
it or defend it. I find it to be more of a "religious"
argument than a functional distinction.

So, there are at least 4 major different views on NC.
And in my opinion, only number (1) has any functional
basis. It qualifies as a Strategic Move in the
Game Theory sense of the term. It changes the possible
options of the game. But even then, it still has the
problem of figuring out what exactly is commercial,
what is free advertising, and what is a lost sale.

As far as I'm concerned, options
2, 3, and 4, are all subjective decisions to draw a
line in the sand somewhere and say "Here, Yes. There, No."

The idea of codifying "Fair Use" is something I can
sympathize with, but I think it ended up going from
one fuzzy definition to another. which means you may
have offloaded the problem to someone else.
You just wanted to make a copy of a song and give it
to a friend. Non Comercial. No worries. now, the people
who are wondering if they qualify are the folks who are
further over to the proprietary line of things.

(3) and (4) seem like they are wholly based on
religious style arguments. Dogmatic views passed down
from people who think the world should be their way,
and want a license that implements that. They don't
really change the landscape of the problem, though.
But they got a license that follows their ideology,
so they're happy.

So, the moral of the story, I suppose, is that, yes,
you'd probably find some people who would like to
change NC or create alternate versions of NC, because
there are several groups using NC for wildly different
reasons. And I'm sure none of them are exactly happy
with where teh lines got drawn in the license compared
to where they drew the lines in their mind.

Whether a change to NC is a good thing, I'm not sure.

I'm pretty sure that making two NC alternates is a
bad idea simply because that doesn't resolve any of
the confusion about what NC actually is, it just adds
confusion about what THIS NC is versus what THAT NC is.

But you're not the first person to raise the quesiton
of what is NC. And unfortunately, you probably won't
be the last.

Greg