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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>
  • To: Development of Creative Commons licenses <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
  • Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:30:25 -0500

Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>> No one can promise to give a fully neutral presentation of something
>> they have themselves produced, but as an organizational goal, it's more
>> honest.
>
> Which is more honest? :) Maybe you meant "more noble."

It is always more honest to present whole truths instead of half truths.

Advertising and propaganda are _always_ half truths. You can never trust
the absence of negative information in an advertisement to mean that
there truly are no negatives to the thing advertised.

On the other hand, _educational_ materials are expected to be as
complete as possible -- there is some expectation of completeness.

It's reasonable to expect that even when attempting to present the whole
truth that an individual with a known bias (e.g. the person who created
or presented a given idea) will necessarily fall short of the whole truth.

However, if you don't even make honesty a _goal_, then that's much worse.

Joking aside, I don't think that saying "I'm going to lie to you" and
then following through by lying is classifiable as "honest" behavior. ;-)

(Geez, now we know we're dealing with lawyers... we have to _explain_
the concept of "honesty"! :-P ).

> In any case, point taken. The nice thing about "Promote and explain
> the licenses and associated tools" (apart from its honesty) is that it
> doesn't need to specify a target. "Educate the world about the
> licenses and associated tools" sounds kind of corny to me and "Provide
> education about the licenses and associated tools" sounds too specific
> to me, possibly implying classes or similar.

Why not just say "Educate the public about the licenses and tools"?

No need to make it complicated.

The point behind this issue is that we are talking about the goals to be
set within the CC community. I think that making the metric of success
for this point "full and accurate communication" rather than
"communication which most promotes the success of CC" is important.

For example, if the honest truth is that, say, License Art Libre is a
better license, then continuing (dishonestly) to claim that CC-By-SA are
better may fit the goal of "promotion", but not of "education" (of
course, in that case, we should also have the goal of making CC-By-SA
better).

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com





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