Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell AT gmail.com>]

On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Andrew Rens <andrewrens AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Not even a a maximalist reading of copyright law can prohibit all the ways
> that a work can be monetized, a coherent way to define monetization hasn't
> emerged yet, instead all attempt suffer from the same vagueness as the nc
> clause.

I wasn't proposing 'monitization' as license language: Rather, I was pointing
out that your particular language excluded (one of) the most
significant ways which
creative works are commercial exploited online, and as such— I consider
that particular language fatally flawed.

> Copyright law doesn't restrict every act with a work, since that leads to
> indeterminacy (at least at the margins) but specific acts such as copying.

Thanks for the lecture. It's not particularly relevant here, however. And in
practice the majority of the interesting acts require copying and/or
performance, and so there is usually plenty of room to hang whatever
awful requirements you deem necessary.

> what I am doing is making clear why I think that all the ways to monetize a
> work is not a useful test for a licence.

All? Perhaps not.  But if a license claims to inhibit commercial exploitation/
use in commercial contexts/etc... then it's a pretty poor license if it 
actually
fails to do so in substantial ways.

It's not like I was arguing about a fringe sort of commercial exploitation—
perhaps commercial hyperlinking farms pointing to clearly
non-commercial distribution points—
if I were I might agree with an argument that all possibilities can't
be foreclosed.

Though the current rather blunt blanket language does actually appear
to do a pretty good job of being expansive.

> Have you successfully used the NC licence to ear advertising income? It
> would useful to see examples of such successes.

I haven't personally, as it's not something I'm interested in doing.
It's trivial to do so:

Throw the content on youtube, enable advertising revenue sharing, and use
the license violation to shut down competing clones of your work which
are being spamvertised.

[snip]
> If it is popular that should give us pause to think that perhaps those
> practising such businesses have determined that to be the best option
> available to them to achieve popularity of their work through having others
> distribute them.

Then the license holder is free to permit that usage— and they can
achieve the outcome
where if anyone is getting a cut of a distributors advertising income it's 
them.

(Of course, the copyright holders _own_ usage is always permissible.
The question
isn't what the NC license permits here, it's what competing things it
allows them
to shut down)

> Do you think NC as currently defined avoids this?  If you've spent much time
> on CC discussion lists over the years you'll have seen people who maintain
> that NC bans both you examples, others who think it permits both, and yet
> others who think it allows Ebaumsworld's use but not sale of a CC licensed
> book of the month club and vice versa.

Yes, I do. I used that set of examples because I thought it highlighted
clearly non-desirable outcomes from the language you proposed, thats all.

[snip]
> It might be that all of those who chose NC licences precisely because they
> wanted to control selling etc were mistaken about their own industries but I
> at least regards that is an empirical question and not one that can be
> answered in the abstract.

I don't think that class— those who use the NC license because they hope
to capture/control the commercial use of their works— is mistaken, often 
overly
hopeful perhaps but not mistaken in principle.  Any NC license should
strive to maximally enable that kind of usage, and if it's too
restrictive that could
be remedied by additional grants.