Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Danyl Strype <strypey AT disintermedia.net.nz>]

Tēnā koutou

Thanks to those who have shared their thoughts so far. This reply has
turned into a bit of  novel (CC-BY-SA applies ;). The tl;dr is:
* License retirement is par for the course for CC
* no licenses with ND or NC are accepted by any of the software
freedom movements
* NC does not allow re-use by many not-for-profit institutions which
have to bring in money to cover externally-imposed costs, BY-SA is a
better choice to prevent one-way exploitation
* NC needs to be renamed to properly describe its function, and
limited in duration and in how its conditions can propagate
* ND makes a mockery of Lessig's defence of "free culture" and solves
no problem that isn't more clearly solved by a less restrictive
license (or ARR copyright)

Like Hamish and Jonathon, I'm all for diversity and choice, but as SRC
pointed out in their blog post, CC has retired many of its licenses.
For example, in the change from version 1.0 to 2.0, almost half the
licenses were dropped (all those not requiring attribution). Some of
the clauses CC has tried out were simply failed experiments (eg
Sampling, DevNations), and once this becomes clear, there's no point
investing more energy in maintaining them:
http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses

In fact, the number of retired licenses is now greater than the total
number of licenses in the toolkit, as it should be. One of the
benefits of having a standardised license suite like CC is to avoid
the uncertainty, and chilling effects on up-take, caused by the
proliferation of little-used and subtly-different licenses.

Take a look at the many Free Software licenses that exist. There's a
good reason why the vast majority of free code/ open source software
projects are licensed under either  a GNU General Public License
("GPL" or variants like "AGPL" and "LGPL")  or a "BSD" (or "MIT")
style license. Most of the others licenses are less rigorous vanity
licenses, with essentially the same conditions:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

While we're on the subject, I've seen some blog comments defending NC
and ND by reference to the co-existence of GPL and BSD. I think it's
important to note that their closest CC cousins are CC-BY-SA (the
license adopted by Wikipedia) and CC-BY respectively, and neither has
an equivalent of NC or ND. Software developers who still use
"freeware" and "shareware" licenses - which do include ND and NC
conditions and are not Free Software/ Open Source compatible - are
generally not considered part of the software freedom movement.

Returning to the specific case of NC, I'm particularly bothered by the
fact some people seem to choose NC thinking they are giving permission
to use their work for charitable or not-for-profit purposes, eg in a
public school or university. In fact, in any case where a group or
institution collects money (eg donations or fees) for a service that
includes CC-licensed work, it is "commercial" and in violation of NC
license conditions. A BY-SA is a better way of making sure for-profit
companies that sell your work have to give their improvements back to
the commons, and let their derivatives be re-used as freely as the
original re-use of the commons you're licensing.

As a way of reducing this confusion, I think a good compromise could
be a simplified version of proposal #11 on the 'NonCommercial'
discussion page:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/NonCommercial

"NC Proposal No.11 Rename NC to CRR [Commercial Rights Reserved] to
clarify real function plus reduce incompatibility by providing NC/CRR
term only time-limited."

In other words, rename the clause so that it actually sounds like what
it is, and limit its maximum duration to 20 years. This proposal also
includes an option for the creator to offer an even shorter term, but
to be honest I think this over-complicates what could be a simple and
elegant solution. Would this perhaps be a solution for the tramping
groups you mentioned Jonathon?

I'd definitely like to skewer the CC-NC-ND, and even the
less-restrictive CC-NC-SA. One of the ridiculous things that motivated
me to support CC was hip-hop and techno artists getting legally
savaged for highly novel re-use of music still under copyright eg
using unrecognisable samples in new songs, or writing folk
arrangements of classic songs which could never be mistaken for the
original, or sold to the same audience. A classic example of the
latter is the story of the summer party tune 'Hip Hop Holiday' by 3
the Hard Way.
http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/friday-music-the-hard-way-back/

I can understand an artist using CC-BY-NC to give them a chance to
sell their own song or album, before a record company is allowed to
mass market it. But if someone substantially remixes or minimally
samples the work, that's a new work, and as long as it doesn't violate
trademarks (eg things like the name of the original artist or his
song/album), I don't see why the NC condition should propagate to it
(which it does in combination with SA), let alone why it should be
preventable by combining NC with ND.

Actually, I have yet to see a good defence for including ND in
anything called a "Commons". Any license which includes ND is
basically a "free beer" license, and gives permission for non-profit
sharing which in a sane world would be covered by fair use/ fair
dealing anyway. I have often wondered why the ND clause was sanctioned
by a man who wrote a book called:
"Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down
Culture and Control Creativity"

...and gives talks with titles like 'Laws that choke creativity'
http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html

Great discussion so far. Anyone else like to chime in?

Ngā mihi
Strypey

On 30 August 2012 21:43, Matt McGregor <mcgma709 AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Timothy Vollmer from CC HQ has a blog post on this issue here:
> http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33874
>
> And if you have a few hours, there's an extremely busy debate on this
> in the general Creative Commons community list. The link to the list
> archive is here. Scroll 7/8 of the way down:
> https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-community/2012-August/thread.html




-- 
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

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speak to the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
- Harmony Goldberg and Joshua Kahn Russell
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"Both Marxists and Chicago-school libertarian economists can agree
that free software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
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