Cc-uk mailing list

[Tom Chance <tom AT acrewoods.net>]

On Wednesday 21 December 2005 10:08, David Hirst .com wrote:
> An interesting and relevant piece about the incompatibilities across
> licences.
>
> http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16073,300,p1.html?trk=nl

It's a shame the article doesn't address the incompatibilities between CC 
licenses, which I think is even more worrying. It's made worse by the fact 
that many people think it's sufficient to say that they use "a CC license". 
It's something I've covered in a couple of articles from practical 
experience:
http://tom.acrewoods.net/writing/remixculture
http://tom.acrewoods.net/writing/creativecommonsintro

As David Berry has pointed out, CC isn't a commons, it's a collection of 
compartmentalised private spaces with a certain level of public access. It's 
building up parallel worlds of people who use NC-SA licenses, people who use 
sampling licenses, people who think it's acceptable to use the ND clause, and 
people who use the most copyleft BY-SA licenses.

Could that not be even more damaging to the copyleft movement than CC only 
pushing the more radical BY-SA license with no option for NC? Or (god forbid) 
only pushing the BY-NC-SA option. Don't even get me started on ND... In 
trying to liberate people from legal complexities so they can get on with 
creating, CC is just entangling people in a new layer of complexity that many 
are likely to completely ignore (and as I discuss in the first article above, 
many already do so).


Presumably some of the arguments against just merging BY-SA and BY-NC-SA also 
work against effectively merging the FDL and BY-SA?

Regards,
Tom

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