Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> It seems like we're still thinking far too old school about
> licenses (or at least the creation of them). Attributes are
> supposed to be just that - attributes of something bigger.
> Shouldn't the core of the licenses be the bigger thing,
> while the various conditions (i.e. attributes) are easy to
> swap out?  Its sounds like we're getting caught up in the
> branding, rather than providing a simple method for someone to
> clearly "express intent" of their content.

Uh, most CC licenses boil down to the basic Alphabet soup.
CC-NC-ND-BY
CC-SA
CC-etc

All I've heard so far is a suggestion for another variant
of NonCommercial. That doesn't argue for turning the licenses
on their head.

There are only a few things that you can do with a license.
You can dismiss that as "old school", but I'll call it "experience".

There are gift licenses
Public Domain, such as CC-BY
Copyleft, such as CC-SA

and there are market licenses
NonCommercial
NoDerivatives

At some point, any additional distinction gets lost in the noise.

There might be folks who want another NonCommercial license,
but thats because folks want NC to do different things.
There are also folks who consider NC to be a "commons"
license such as for the Education license. Creating another
NC license would further break up that commons and those
people wouldn't like it.

At the moment, I don't use NC, so I'm not attached to which
version of NC survives. But one of the reasons I don't use
NC is because it's being used for dumb reasons, and personally,
putting those dumb reasons into the language of yet another
license sounds like about the worst thing that CC could do.

If CC keeps it up, and adds more NC type licenses, then they
should just fess up and change their name to CreativeMarketing.
Because whatever "commons" they claim exists under an NC
umbrella would have been shattered by a multitude of NC variants.

I don't think NC qualifies as a commons to begin with,
but some folks have used that argument to justify the
name Creative *Commons*. And if they fracture that any more,
I think they can no longer justify their name.

> James, you said: "Here, I think that the NC license provides an okay
> basis for a "no resale" license in practice; use the NC and then state
> that you are also okay with companies using it for internal purposes."
>
> This, in my opinion, defeats much of the point of CC.

I'm not exactly sure what the point of CC is anymore.
I hope it isn't to create licenses that define every
possible flavor of arbitrary and subjective license
requirements.

But I've been wrong about CC before.