Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris AT sfu.ca>]

Some thoughts:

An overall philosophical question which I think should be considered in CC 
development is the impact of encouraging people to use these licenses on how 
people think about the works that they create. CC is a powerful tool to 
counter automatic copyright, but if every time someone creates something they 
think in terms of rights then I think that this accidentally reinforces the 
idea of "intellectual property". In terms of the current discussion, if every 
time someone creates something they  use a CC license and have to choose 
whether commercial rights are granted or reserved, this entrenches the idea 
that every creation comes with commercial rights. 

Noncommercial is not optimal either. However, from a language perspective it 
is better than "commercial rights reserved" because it gives the creator an 
opportunity to say that "this is outside of the commercial realm". Things 
that are outside of the commercial realm can be brought into it - however for 
some of us, expanding the portion of the world that is outside of commerce is 
a very important statement, and it's fine if it is vague. 

I would also argue in favour of vagueness in some cases over clarity. 
Creative Commons is about sharing. The concept of sharing is vague, and not 
understood the same way by everyone. This is true of all abstract concepts, 
like love, justice, and peace. Some of our best work happens in the realm of 
the vague - this is the space for expanding our thinking about some very 
important matters, such as sharing our work rather than locking it down.

Clarity may well be desired in some situations and/or for some organizations. 
However, it is not clear that the same delineation of rights, or the same 
definition of commercial, makes sense in all circumstances. Part of the 
discussion around "noncommercial" has been lack of clarity about what 
constitutes "commercial".  "Commercial rights reserved" would not make the 
definition of what constitutes "commercial" any clearer. Then too, the kinds 
of rights that creators might wish to reserve may well vary - the kinds of 
rights a book publisher considers reserved for commercial purposes may not be 
the same kinds of rights that a software developer might expect to reserve.

It may be that what is needed is specific licenses modeled on Creative 
Commons that are not part of the CC license suite. This will sometimes add 
clarity - book publishers can say go ahead and do this, but not that - and at 
other times leave things vague, which I argue also has its benefits.

Finally, rather than insisting that "noncommercial" be relablled "commercial 
rights reserved", perhaps it would make more sense to add CCR as an 
additional license element.

best,

Heather Morrison



On 2012-12-11, at 8:07 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru AT gmail.com> wrote:
>> Greetings,
>> I am concerned by the plausible effect of “Commercial Rights Reserved“
>> potential of sending legacy copyright‘s chilling effect?
>> Borne of the need to protect the otherwise ‘grey‘ innovation space enjoyed
>> under the current licences categorizations.
> 
> I do not understand what you are saying here even if I temporarily
> accept the premise that it is ethical to intentionally write vague
> licenses with for the purpose of fostering misunderstandings and make
> their user's intentions unenforceable.
> 
> Can you specifically enumerate an example sequence of events which
> using "commercial rights reserved" instead of "non commercial" may
> result in an unwelcome outcome due to a reduction in "grey innovation
> space"?
> _______________________________________________
> List info and archives at 
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
> Unsubscribe at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/options/cc-licenses
> 
> In consideration of people subscribed to this list to participate 
> in the CC licenses http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0 development
> process, please direct unrelated discussions to the cc-community list
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-community