Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Paul Keller <pk AT kl.nl>]

On 15 May 2012, at 02:24, jonathon wrote:

> On 13/05/12 08:45, Paul Keller wrote:
> 
> > The beauty of the current definition of non-commercial is that it is 
> > acceptable for a very large number of users.
> 
> Is it acceptable to those users because of the rights it protects, or
> because of the rights they think it protects?
> 
> In some fields of endeavour, the gap between those two groups of rights
> is so wide, one would be forgiven for thinking that people were
> referring to two different licenses.

and that is the core of my argument: it is a good thing that the NC provision 
is so flexible. Otherwise we would need 2 NC license for each of the fields 
of endeavor that we can identify. 

> > On the other hand the current NC provision has not created any major 
> > problems in the wild. 
> 
> AFAIK, all of the dozen odd court cases relating specifically to
> infringement issues, have involved an NC license. (I don't have a list
> of those cases, the sticking point that led to going to court, and the
> outcome.)

i do not think that there have been a dozen of cases and the one that i am 
aware of were indeed about the NC provision where the licensors claimed that 
the provision had been violated and the courts sided with their claim. (this 
refers to the curry case linked to in my initial mail) 

> > Given the intensity of the discussions here one would expect that there 
> > are frequent conflicts between licensors and licensees of NC 
> licensed material but that is simply not the case.
> 
> a) The survey done by Creative Commons would suggest that the absence of
> such conflict is due to potential users deciding that their usage would
> be a license violation.

that is how the licenses are supposed to work. a user looks at the condition 
and makes a decision if she want's to comply with those conditions or not. 
this is not a conflict between licensor and licensee

> b i) Of the twenty or so forks of the various CC licenses I have seen,
> only one of them has not been a fork of the NC license. To me, this
> implies that potential NC license users are engaging in license
> proliferation, precisely because the NC license does not address their
> specific concerns.

the key word here is 'specific concerns'. we now have something that works 
for millions of users. If we start addressing specific concerns in what is 
supposed to be a generic tool we ill break that generic tool.

> b ii) That NC license proliferation basically boils down to three use cases:
> * Distribution must be gratis to the recipient;
> * Individuals, and non-profits may use the content. It is off limits for
> everybody else;
> * Content can be used for educational purposes. All other usage is off
> limits;
> 
> Each of the NC forks I've read has created two or three issues,in an
> attempt to nail down the NC part of the license.

again, the beauty of the current definition is that it accommodates these 
three use cases and many more without requiring a specific license for each 
of them. in the end people are free to create forks if they require something 
special. it is something that we should not encourage, but also not something 
we should encourage. /paul