Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Monday 27 August 2012 16:26:48 Heather Morrison wrote:
> Since I am not on the Students for Free Culture list, I am wondering how
> best to talk with this group about this topic? Some points for them to
> consider:
>
> CC licenses are used by different communities, for different types of
> works, and different rights may be priority.

Indeed and it is an uneasy coexistence. Brought about by CC's choice to make 
a 
range of licenses, some Free and some non-Free. And I don't think there is 
anything that can be done about it short of dropping the non-Free, dropping 
the Free, or splitting CC into Free and non-Free entities.

> For example, CC licenses are 
> used by many in the movement for open access to scholarly works. Here, free
> of cost is critical,

There is no CC license that guarantees that any cc licensed work will be 
gratis.

> and people have a hard time understanding that a CC-BY 
> license can be applied to a for-pay work. From this perspective, CC-BY is
> not a good fit for free culture.

CC-BY is similar to the BSD and MIT licenses, tell those folk that their 
licenses are not a good fit for Free Software.

Granted the permissive licenses are not a good fit for guaranteeing Freedom, 
you need copyleft to try and get there, but they are a fine fit for Free 
culture for the works they license.
>
> NC and ND are not necessarily for middlemen. These can also protect
> original creators from exploitation by middlemen -one of the reasons I use
> NC.

And yet NC gives no more protection from middlemen than plain ARR and somehow 
middlemen exploit creatives all the time even though they get ARR protection 
for the works they create.
>
> There are many who make works freely available with these restrictions who
> would likely go to even greater restrictions without these options.

Go for it. I am not touching it in any case. If you don't want to respect my 
Freedom, I prefer to ignore your work.

> One 
> example of relevance to students: many publishers are looking to a
> free-to-read online but pay a modest cost for print model.

Unless the publishers are the authors, who cares what they prefer? 

> Some manage with 
> CC-BY, others feel strongly that NC is imperative. Without this option, I
> would expect students to have to pay for more textbooks.

Because? This is a racket?
>
> Finally, deprecating someone else's perspective is rarely a good strategy.

Well, it they are willing to restrict my freedom, they made the first move in 
the poor strategy department.

> I am requesting that CC drop the gratuitous insult (this is not free
> culture) from the new license chooser.

I request they keep it. I request again that they at least create and 
official 
FreeCC brand and logo if they do not drop NC and ND this round.

I find it an insult when people put NC and ND on works and act like they are 
doing me a favour. When they act like we are somehow walking along the same 
path.

> If this statement makes me change my 
> behavior, it would incline me to stop using CC licenses altogether. I
> suspect that it would have a similar effect on others.

That is because the people who are seeking to enhance Freedom via CC and 
those 
that are not and are content with non-Free licenses have little in common in 
this area.

Again, you can thank CC for mixing us all under one umbrella when we have 
such 
different aims and aspirations.
>
> Best,
>
> Heather Morrison

Never the less, all the best,

drew
(who intends no actual insults with the above even though it may be worded 
with strong language)
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Danny Piccirillo <danny.piccirillo AT member.fsf.org>
> To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Sent: Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:08:29 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: [cc-licenses] Fwd: [FC-discuss] Stop the inclusion of proprietary
> licenses in Creative Commons 4.0
>
> via:
> http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-li
>censes-in-creative-commons-4-0/
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Students for Free Culture <webleader+rss-bot AT freeculture.org>
> Date: Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 3:15 AM
> Subject: [FC-discuss] Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in
> Creative Commons 4.0
> To: discuss AT freeculture.org
>
>
> Over the past several years, Creative Commons has increasingly
> recommended free culture licenses over non-free ones. Now that the
> drafting process for version 4.0 of their license set is in full gear,
> this is a “[a once-in-a-decade-or-more opportunity][1]” to deprecate the
> proprietary NonCommercial and NoDerivatives clauses. This is the best
> chance we have to dramatically shift the direction of Creative Commons
> to be fully aligned with the [definition of free cultural works][2] by
> preventing the inheritance of these proprietary clauses in CC 4.0′s
> final release.
>
> The concept of free culture has its roots in the history of free
> software (popularly marketed as "open source software"), and it’s an
> important philosophical underpinning to the CC license set. As with free
> software, the word "free" in free culture means free as in freedom, not
> as in price, but Creative Commons has not [set or adhered to any
> standard or promise of rights][3] or taken [any ethical position][4] in
> their support of a free culture. The definition of free cultural works
> describes the necessary freedoms to ensure that media monopolies cannot
> form to restrict the creative and expressive freedoms of others and
> outlines [which restrictions are permissible or not][5]. Although
> Creative Commons provides non-free licenses, the fact that they
> recognize the definition reveals a willingness and even desire to
> change.
>
> Creative Commons started off by focusing much more on flexibility for
> rightsholders, but since its early days, the organization has moved away
> from that position. Several projects and licenses have been retired such
> as the Sampling, Founders' Copyright, and Developing Nations License.
> It's obvious that something like Founders' Copyright which keeps "all
> rights reserved" for 14 years (before releasing into the public domain)
> is not promoting free culture. Giving rightsholders more options and
> easier ways to choose what rights they want to give others actually
> reinforces permission culture, creates a fragmented commons, and takes
> away freedom from all cultural participants.
>
> **What's wrong with NC and ND?**
>
> The two proprietary clauses remaining in the CC license set are
> [NonCommercial][6] (NC) and [NoDerivatives][7] (ND), and it is time
> Creative Commons stopped supporting them, too. Neither of them provide
> better protection against misappropriation than free culture licenses.
> The ND clause survives on the idea that rightsholders would not
> otherwise be able protect their reputation or preserve the integrity of
> their work, but all these [fears about allowing derivatives][8] are
> either permitted by fair use anyway or already protected by free
> licenses. The [NC clause is vague][9] and survives entirely on two even
> more misinformed ideas. First is rightsholders' fear of giving up their
> copy monopolies on commercial use, but what would be considered
> commercial use is necessarily ambiguous. Is distributing the file on a
> website which profits from ads a commercial use? [Where is the line
> drawn][10] between commercial and non-commercial use? In the end, it
> really isn't. It does not increase the potential profit from work and it
> does not provide any better protection than than Copyleft does (using
> the ShareAlike clause on its own, which is a free culture license).
>
> The second idea is the misconception that NC is anti-property or anti-
> privatization. This comes from the name NonCommercial which implies a
> Good Thing (non-profit), but it's function is counter-intuitive and
> completely antithetical to free culture (it [retains a commercial
> monopoly][11] on the work). That is what it comes down to. The NC clause
> is actually the closest to traditional "all rights reserved" copyright
> because it treats creative and intellectual expressions as private
> property. Maintaining commercial monopolies on cultural works only
> enables middlemen to continue enforcing outdated business models and the
> restrictions they depend on. We can only evolve beyond that if we
> abandon commercial monopolies, eliminating the possibility of middlemen
> amassing control over vast pools of our culture.
>
> Most importantly, though, is that both clauses do not actually
> contribute to a shared commons. They oppose it. The fact that the ND
> clause [prevents cultural participants from building upon works][12]
> should be a clear reason to eliminate it from the Creative Commons
> license set. The ND clause is already the least popular, and
> discouraging remixing is obviously contrary to a free culture. The
> NonCommercial clause, on the other hand, is even more problematic
> because it is not so obvious in its proprietary nature. While it has
> always been a popular clause, it's use has been in slow and steady
> decline.
>
> Practically, the NC clause only functions to cause problems for
> collaborative and remixed projects. It prevents them from being able to
> fund themselves and locks them into a proprietary license forever. For
> example, if Wikipedia were under a NC license, it would be [impossible
> to sell printed or CD copies of Wikipedia][13] and reach communities
> without internet access because every single editor of Wikipedia would
> need to give permission for their work to be sold. The project would
> need to survive off of donations (which Wikipedia has proven possible),
> but this is much more difficult and completely unreasonable for almost
> all projects, especially for physical copies. Retaining support for NC
> and ND in CC 4.0 would give them much more weight, making it extremely
> difficult to retire them later, and continue to feed the fears that
> nurture a permission culture.****
>
> **Why does this need to happen now?**
>
> People have been vocal about this issue for a long time, and awareness
> of the problematic nature of ND and NC has been spreading, especially in
> the areas of [Open Educational Resources][14] (such as OpenCourseWare)
> and [Open Access to research][15]. With the percentage of CC-licensed
> works that permit remixing and commercial use having [doubled][16] since
> Creative Commons' first year, it's clear that there is a growing
> recognition that the non-free license clauses are not actually
> necessary, or even good.
>
> Both NC and ND are incompatible with free licenses and many, if not the
> vast majority, of NC and ND licensed works will not be relicensed after
> CC 4.0, so the longer it takes to phase out those clauses, the more
> works will be locked into a proprietary license. There will never be a
> better time than this. Creative Commons has been shifting away from non-
> free licenses for several years, but if it does not abandon them
> entirely it will fail as a commons and [divide our culture][17] into
> disconnected parts, each with its own distinct licence, rights and
> permissions granted by the copyright holders who 'own' the works.
>
> In December of 2006, Creative Commons implemented a subtle difference
> between the pages for free culture and non-free licenses: green and
> yellow background graphics (compare [Attribution-ShareAlike][18] to
> [Attribution-NonCommercial][19]). This was also when they began using
> license buttons that include license property icons, so that there would
> be an immediate visual cue as to the specific license being used before
> clicking through to the deed. In February of 2008, they began using a
> seal on free culture licenses that said "[Approved for Free Cultural
> Works][20]", which was another great step in the right direction. In
> July of this year, Creative Commons released a [completely redesigned
> license chooser][21] that explicitly says whether the configuration
> being used is free culture or not. This growing acknowledgement of free
> vs. non-free licenses was a crucial development, since being under a
> Creative Commons license is so often equated with being a free cultural
> work. Now, retiring the NC and ND clauses is a critical step in Creative
> Commons' progress towards taking a pro-freedom approach.
>
> The NC and ND clauses not only depend on, but also feed misguided
> notions about their purpose and function. With that knowledge, it would
> be a mistake not to retire them. Creative Commons should not depend on
> and nurture rightsholders' fears of misappropriation to entice them into
> choosing non-free CC licenses. Instead of wasting effort maintaining and
> explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an
> organization should focus on providing better and more consistent
> support for the licenses that really make sense. We are in the perfect
> position to finally create a unified and undivided commons. Creative
> Commons is at a crossroads.This decisive moment will in all likelihood
> bind their direction either being stuck serving the fears that validate
> permission culture or creating a shared commons between all cultural
> participants.
>
> We don't want the next generation of the free culture movement to be
> saddled with the dichotomies of the past; we want our efforts to be
> spent fighting the next battles.****
>
> **What should we do? **
>
> There have been lots of discussions on the CC-license list about
> promoting free culture licenses and discouraging proprietary ones. A
> couple of proposals have been made to encourage the use of free licenses
> over the non-free ones.
>
> One is a rebranding of the non-free licenses. They could be
> differentiated in a much more significant way than it currently is, such
> as referring to NC and ND as the "Restricted Commons" or "Limited
> Commons" or some variant thereof. License buttons could also be color
> coded in the same way that license pages are (green for free culture
> licenses, yellow for proprietary ones). Another proposal is to rename
> NonCommercial to something more honest such as CommercialMonopoly.
>
> While these proposals and other ideas are certainly worth supporting, we
> should not lose sight on our ultimate goal: for Creative Commons to stop
> supporting non-free licenses. We should not feel like this is impossible
> to achieve at this point, as it will be much more difficult to do later.
> More people than ever are starting to advocate against proprietary CC
> licenses, and there is clear evidence and reasoning behind these
> arguments. We have the power to prevent the inclusion of non-free
> clauses in this upcoming version of the Creative Commons License set.
>
> To join us in resisting the inclusion of proprietary clauses in CC 4.0,
> there are a few important things you can do:
>
>  * Send a letter to the [Creative Commons Board of Directors][22] about
> your concerns.
>
>  * Publish your letter or a blog post on the issue (and send it to the
> list below)
>
>  * Join the Creative Commons licenses development list to participate
> in discussions of the 4.0 draft:
> [http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses][23]
>
>  * Contribute to the CC 4.0 wiki pages:
> [http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0][24]
>
>  [1]: http://governancexborders.com/2011/09/17/cc-global-summit-2011
> -pt-iii-discussing-the-non-commmercial-module/<http://governancexborders.co
>m/2011/09/17/cc-global-summit-2011%0A-pt-iii-discussing-the-non-commmercial-
>module/>
>
>  [2]: http://freedomdefined.org/Definition
>
>  [3]: http://mako.cc/writing/toward_a_standard_of_freedom.html
>
>  [4]: http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20040917-00
>
>  [5]: http://freedomdefined.org/Permissible_restrictions
>
>  [6]: http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
>
>  [7]: http://robmyers.org/2010/02/21/why_nd_is_neither_necessary_nor_s
> ufficient_to_prevent_misrepresentation/<http://robmyers.org/2010/02/21/why_
>nd_is_neither_necessary_nor_s%0Aufficient_to_prevent_misrepresentation/>
>
>  [8]: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26549
>
>  [9]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-9823336-61.html
>
>  [10]: https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-
> licenses/2005-April/002215.html
>
>  [11]: http://robmyers.org/2008/02/24/noncommercial-sharealike-is-not-
> copyleft/<http://robmyers.org/2008/02/24/noncommercial-sharealike-is-not-%0
>Acopyleft/>
>
>  [12]: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110704/15235514961/shouldnt-
> free-mean-same-thing-whether-followed-culture-software.shtml<http://www.tec
>hdirt.com/articles/20110704/15235514961/shouldnt-%0Afree-mean-same-thing-whe
>ther-followed-culture-software.shtml>
>
>  [13]:
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing/Justifications
>
>  [14]: http://kefletcher.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-not-nc-non-
> commercial.html
>
>  [15]: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal
> .pbio.1001210
>
>  [16]: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/28041
>
>  [17]:
> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality
>
>  [18]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
>
>  [19]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
>
>  [20]: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8051
>
>  [21]: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33430
>
>  [22]: mailto:Hal%20Abelson%20%3Chal%40mit.edu%3E%2C%20Glenn%20Otis%20
> Brown%20%3Cgotisbrown%40gmail.com%3E%2C%20Michael%20Carroll%20%3Cmcarrol
> l%40wcl.american.edu%3E%2C%20Catherine%20Casserly%20%3Ccathy%40creativec
> ommons.org%3E%2C%20Caterina%20Fake%20%3Ccaterina%40caterina.net%3E%2C%20
> Brian%20Fitzgerald%20%3Cbrian.fitzgerald%40acu.edu.au%3E%2C%20Davis%20Gu
> ggenheim%20%3Cakhawkins%40mac.com%3E%2C%20Joi%20Ito%20%3Cjoi%40ito.com%3
> E%2C%20Lawrence%20Lessig%20%3Clessig%40pobox.com%3E%2C%20Laurie%20Racine
> %20%3Cracine%40lulu.com%3E%2C%20Eric%20Saltzman%20%3Cesaltzman%40pobox.c
> om%3E%2C%20Annette%20Thomas%20%3CAnnette%40macmillan.co.uk%3E%2C%20Molly
> %20Van%20Houweling%20%3Cmsvh%40pobox.com%3E%2C%20Jimmy%20Wales%20%3Cjwal
> es%40wikia.com%3E%2C%20Esther%20Wojcicki%20%3Cesther%40creativecommons.o
> rg%3E%2C%20
>
>  [23]: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
>
>  [24]: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0
>
> URL:
> http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-li
>censes-in-creative-commons-4-0/
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