Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris AT sfu.ca>]

On 2011-12-21, at 7:36 AM, drew Roberts wrote:

> On Tuesday 20 December 2011 14:31:32 Heather Morrison wrote:
>> I strongly advocate for understanding the need for creators to make a
>> living, and including those who share as much as they can while reserving
>> some rights so that they can make a living in the commons.
> 
> This is very confusing. Is it a commons or not. Do people share the works 
> in 
> common or not?
> 
> NC is not a commons way of sharing. One person gets to make money the rest 
> of 
> the world does not. This is in no way sharing the work in common is it?
> 
> Can you explain exactly what you mean here and perhaps give some more 
> concrete 
> examples?

One example from the area of scholarly publishing would be a small 
not-for-profit book publisher. If there were lots of subsidy money to pay for 
salaries and rent, they may well be happy to give away all rights. However, 
it is much more common for such publishers to have to recover some or all of 
their costs. In this case, reserving commercial rights such as the sale of 
print-on-demand or other value-added versions, then they can give as much to 
the commons as they can (free to read, perhaps even free to re-use) while 
still being able to publish. If we insist that this is not free, it is not a 
contribution at all to the commons, then they may either retreat to not 
making anything available for free at all, or they may follow our advice and 
give away their work, in which case someone else who did none of the work of 
creating the books might be better at business than they are, and they may 
lose money and even go out of business. 

I would argue that a healthy commons requires small independent creators. 
Such creators need food and shelter like the rest of us, and this may mean 
reserving commercial rights to their works. This is one of the reasons that I 
think a healthy commons must embrace the noncommercial approach.

Another example from scholarly publishing: if publishers give away their 
journals as CC-BY, then other publishers can sell the journals. These other 
publishers cannot of course stop the original journals from functioning - but 
there is nothing to stop them from working with others to lobby for laws, 
such as trade laws, that prevent the original journals from receiving needed 
support such as public funding.  If this happens, then the original journals 
can disappear, and what was CC-BY can become toll access only. SA will help 
here too, but only NC specifically addresses the very real potential of 
corporate capture of the commons.

Another example is my own blog, which is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. At this point 
in time, I am fortunate enough to have a full-time job and no need to make 
money from this blog. However, in this world there are no guarantees for any 
of us, and if at some point I needed money, I would be very glad that I did 
reserve rights to sales of my work. If I were to change the license to CC-BY, 
then someone else could legally mirror my blog and sell ads on their copy. 
This would make me angry, not only at the person selling ads on a copy of my 
blog, but also at anyone who told me that I should license my work as CC-BY. 
At that point, I can see myself changing my standard licensing practise to 
all rights reserved, or not using CC licenses at all. I suspect that many 
people would have the same reaction in this situation.

best,

Heather Morrison, MLIS
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com