Interesting timing. I just posted my response on your previous entry. Mark, I agree with you; the NC condition should not be included in a “free” model.
— Scott 
See http://freecontentdefinition.org/Definition
Lots of people dislike NC. Here’s what I usually tell them, e.g., http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2006-January/003113.html given that NC exists:
If BY-SA is the license that has the most powerful combination of allowing reuse while mandating continued freedom, won’t it eventually become the most popular license regardless of what other options are offered, just as GPL became most popular in the face of less restrictive and various non-free (shareware, etc) competition?
The best thing those of you who don’t like NC (or ND) can do to further your cause is to promote use and reuse of PD, BY, and BY-SA content.
Which is exactly what Mark was doing in the previous post.
(I work for CC but am not speaking for them here.)
Mark, you might want to read Ben Mako Hill’s extensive thinking on the subject of CC’s goals and motives. Gets fairly detailed, in much the same direction you’re going. Coincidentally, Mako and Lessig will be on a panel tomorrow(?) discussing content licensing. Hopefully there will be a recording of it made public.
I feel that NC is acceptable sometimes. For the most part I think the important parts of CC, the first principles, should be BY and SA. But they are not.
Creative Commons allows people to disable parts of copyright. BY-NC-ND lets people distribute a copyrighted work while the author maintains complete control (legally) of the content. I agree that that doesn’t help create a creative commons at all and therefore shouldn’t be associated with the CC brand. But it does slightly decrease the restrictiveness of a copyright which is why it does fall under CC. CC’s first principle is not creative commons it is “Some rights reserved” which is unfortunate given the brand name they chose. The goal is to not have all content locked into an essentially ever-lasting copyright (all rights reserved) and instead allow creators to choose what rights they want to reserve (some rights reserved) which is why the CC licenses allow for so many options. They have to account for each right that a copyright reserves. blah.
If someone wants to profit from you work and you have BY-SA enabled then aren’t they required to release their finished product under the same conditions? Even if they charge to get the content wouldn’t the first person to buy it have legal right to distribute it?
I couldn’t agree more. There are many liberal political undertones to the whole free software idea (if that’s what people call it). One of the consequences of this is that you can’t force someone to be liberal in their views if they don’t want to me. I think this rolls over to free software too, and hence sometimes you come across people perhaps wanting to take advantage of the license it’s been released under. But this is something you must do in a free society.
Mark: in what way was your software used, that you didn’t approve of?
I think most people (i.e., those that give a slight thought about it) stick to using NC CC licenses because they don’t want someone else to profit from their content if they aren’t. But again, this is something else you must accept for the free model to be truly realised. If it’s improving improving things for many, then it can only be a good thing, right?
One thing I moan about are the swarms of people switching over to GNU/Linux, simply because it doesn’t cost anything, without ever realising the ideology of free software. Then they proceed to try and use proprietary software with it, defeating the entire objective of free software in the first place.
— Chris
@Nathaniel (and to some extent @Chris as well): I agree. CC’s “first principles” (if there are any at all) are simply “don’t be quite as evil as those guys over there.” Lawrence Lessig is well-aware of this (see, for example, CC in Review from last December) and sees nothing wrong with it. But there’s no ideology behind it; Lessig explicitly admits that each license was created to address a specific need. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it bothers me that so many people have (mis)construed Creative Commons as the non-code equivalent of Free and Open Source Software. (CC’s chosen terminology doesn’t help either.)
A better analogy is that CC is the non-code equivalent of Softpedia’s “100% Spyware Free!” certification. Um… OK… I guess that’s better than the alternative. (As SuperTux’s developer put it, “Apparently it’s easier these days to point out software that does not contain malicious code.”) But it’s aiming kinda low, don’t you think?
Which leads to my final point: Creative Commons, as it exists right now, is a garden path that is actively harming the possibility of establishing a true Free Culture Revolution. This is where I vehemently disagree with Mike (above), who asked “If BY-SA is the license that has the most powerful combination of allowing reuse while mandating continued freedom, won’t it eventually become the most popular license regardless of what other options are offered?” Well, no, because (as I said in my original post) most people aren’t license geeks. There were a lot of software licenses that had subtle bits of non-free-ness, that people claimed were “open source”, before Bruce Perens et. al. established the Open Source definition and started excluding certain licenses based on those first principles. (And the FSF maintained a similar list before that.)
That’s the real danger of Creative Commons — it defines a community, and it looks like that community would have some first principles that would establish a shorthand for discussing licensing and freedoms. I can say that an application is “open source”, and you can instantly take for granted a certain set of guaranteed rights, and then we can continue the discussion at a higher level — is it viral, etc. But CC doesn’t really draw a line in the sand anywhere; there’s a CC license for pretty much anything short of draconian copyright. To say that something is “Creative Commons-licensed” is to guarantee virtually nothing, except that I can download it for free and read/listen/watch it without getting fisted by DRM rootkits.
So people like me, who would like to see Free Software’s “first principles” applied to non-code, are reduced to advising people, “well, you can use a Creative Commons license, but be sure to use one of these 2 licenses and ignore the other 9, because blah blah blah…” Trust me, I’ve already lost their attention at that point.
(Oh, and let’s not even mention that *all* CC licenses are incompatible with the GPL and the DFSG. That’s a separate rant for another day.)
— Mark
Don’t forget, when you license your pictures under NC, places like wikipedia who have an actual free license (GFDL) can’t use them. This is a constant source of confusion for people, because they think they should be able to upload NC works to wikipedia, since wikipedia isn’t making money. We don’t allow that though, since other people are free to reuse wikipedia content in commercial ways. The licenses that cause this problem are about 100% some variety of CC-NC. We do consider CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA to be compatible with GFDL, but it seems most people, when given the choice, choose NC.
— Judson
Hi Mark,
From what I understand about CC, I think your post is misleading in two ways:
One, I think the use of “licensed for noncommercial use only”, “prohibiting commercial use”, and “banning commerical discrimination” promote a misconception about the way CC works. By choosing the Non-Commercial option, you aren’t actively prohibiting commercial use, you are simply reserving the right already granted to you for your work in commercial scenarios. This means that instead of granting general permission up front, commercial works must approach you for specific permission. The option does not imply that there should be no place for commercial works or that commercial works and CC works shouldn’t overlap. It’s saying that the introduction of money changes the way creators think about their works. Improving things for many is bad when doing so adjusts the parameters of the market to make it less practical for future altruism. The NC option keeps those parameters in check, while promoting the viability of a commons.
Two, your description of CC’s options comes off as slightly sarcastic: “plenty to choose from” and “wide spectrum of licenses”. There are 4 binary options when publishing CC, which linearizes to 2^4 = 16 total options. But there are 4 orthogonal choices to be made, and the underlying legalese takes care of creating the tuple with 16 distinct values (actually 15). I think 4 choices is undeserving of sarcasm, whatsoever. In fact, I think the CC team has done an amazing job of coming up with the most important, intuitive dimensions that matter to a creator.
This brings me to what I view as the CC philosophy, which is not “lets be slightly less evil,” or to be “open source,” but to give the creator a choice! That choice is precisely what’s needed to create a rich ecosystem of commoners that can interact with existing copyright systems. To reduce the choice down to open vs. not-open is to create a dichotomy that unnecessarily oppresses on both ends.
Obviously, I think both you and your audience are incredibly bright, which is why I felt the urge to criticize and share my understanding. I’m glad you’re back in the ’sphere after that long hiatus.
> I think 4 choices is undeserving of sarcasm, whatsoever.
You must have missed the Sampling License, the Sampling Plus License, the Noncommercial Sampling Plus License, the Founders Copyright License, the Music Sharing License, and the Developing Nations License. Not to mention the plethora of country-specific variations, many of which are incompatible with each other. Not to mention the fact that most of their licenses have been through at least 2 revisions, which are also not compatible with each other.
— Mark
@Mark: I have missed them, in fact! I can certainly excuse the developing nations and country-specific variations, but I didn’t know about Sampling, etc. I’ll have to check into those. I have to admit, they don’t sound nearly as orthogonal.
> This means that instead of granting general permission up front, commercial works must approach you for specific permission.
I could say the same thing about the GPL. It doesn’t prohibit use in closed source applications — after all, the developer of a closed source application could choose to open up their entire source code. Or they could contact me for separate licensing terms. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact several successful open source businesses use this “dual licensing” model. (MySQL, Sleepycat’s BerkeleyDB, Borland’s Kylix, to name a few.) But you can’t weasel-word your way out of this. “Creative Commons” (as a whole) doesn’t guarantee a single one of the freedoms that would be necessary ingredients towards creating an actual commons.
Where would Ubuntu Linux be if every single one of their 14437 packages required contacting the author for permission to sell a CD for $1? What the hell kind of “commons” is that?
— Mark
So you’re saying you don’t agree with, or I didn’t clearly express, what I meant by “Improving things for many is bad when doing so adjusts the parameters of the market to make it less practical for future altruism?” My assertion is that rampant commercial use of work freely contributed to the commons makes it less viable for a commons to become an actual competitor to restrictive copyright. No weaseling, just my understanding.
Ubuntu Linux would be in the same spot as music from the commons who required listeners to request permission before responding emotionally to their work. The primary use case of an OS is to make someone productive. The primary use case of music is to make someone feel. Clearly, there’s a disconnect across media, yet copyright paints broadly. CC aggregates and simplifies (at least some of) the choices you need to promote commons across media, where context matters.
A pile of free stuff is not a commons, though, Kurtiss. A real, healthy, functioning (dare I say creative?) commons requires the ability to intermix and redistribute, and to do so with minimal permission-seeking so that the resulting output can be complex and inter-generational. If you can’t do all that, it’s just a public library.
(I think both Lessig and Benkler would agree with me, though the experience of Stallman and Raymond has shown them that sometimes you get further by shutting up than by being a firebrand.)
@Luis: Actually, I agree with that as well. I think what that really means though, is that work placed in the commons needs to be network-effect-friendly (not completely free/open), which is the catalyst for that creative ecosystem. Meanwhile, I find that some restrictions on the work can help to promote the raw inputs for the information-begets-information cycle of an active commons. Further, the optimal degree of restriction lies at different points for different types of work (music vs. OS, above).
@Kurtiss: I’m following you right up to ‘the optimal degree of restriction lies at different points for different types of work’- I’m not sure why that would be, except for a (transitory) difference in maturity/understanding of licensing in the relevant creative community.
I think it’s worth mentioning here (and not just because it’s my hobby-horse) the various educational initiatives that try to apply a similarly parochial “only for educational purposes” rider to their “free”-ly available content and therefore similarly, though with further reaching cultural impacts, damn their outputs to being underused and ignored. In fact I believe that exception was, at least, suggested as yet another CC project though I don’t know if it ever went ahead.
I don’t know if it’s just my years of Open Source perspective but such ideas seems overwhelmingly short-sighted, narrow-minded and destructive to the extent that I just can’t believe it’s not obvious to others. Limiting (re-)use to a single geographic region is another classic move that often forms a one-two knockout in this arena. “Cutting your nose off to spite your face” is the phrase that always springs to mind for me.
On a somewhat related tangent, ever noticed that Wikipedia, despite regularly featuring in occasionally high-brow slanging matches about quality and usefulness and being pitted in deathmatches against Britannica etc. by journalists, only rarely has its status as free content mentioned? Then again most of the articles miss the fact that it stores a revision history, so I’m not sure what I’m hoping for.
— dave
I would suggest that, from the point of view of the author, there are substantial differences in the type of benefits they are likely to experience from a less restrictive license depending on the type of work involved.
For software, allowing substantial freedom in the use of the software amongst third parties, including commercially, can lead to feedback effects that substantially improve the quality of future versions of the the software for everyone. With a purely “art” work e.g. a photograph, there is little possibility of a direct improvement of the work itself through allowing third-party usage (commercial or not). Instead the benefits are a collection of second-order effects, for example the possibility that the work will be incorporated into a larger work which may benefit the original author.
Given this, it’s not hard to see why software has been faster at adopting a Free model than other creative fields. Whilst some people would be happy to have their photography used in a way that may provide these second order benefits—and so will use a Creative Commons license—they are less likely to enthuse about the possibility that some third party else might start selling prints of their work, since this provides them with little tangible benefit except that conferred by mere distribution (e.g. greater recognition).
— jgraham
To say that something is “Creative Commons-licensed” is to guarantee virtually nothing, except that I can download it for free and read/listen/watch it without getting fisted by DRM rootkits.
Until you buy a Zune.
— Sam Ruby
For software, allowing substantial freedom in the use of the software amongst third parties, including commercially, can lead to feedback effects that substantially improve the quality of future versions of the the software for everyone. … Whilst some people would be happy to have their photography used in a way that may provide these second order benefits—and so will use a Creative Commons license—they are less likely to enthuse about the possibility that some third party else might start selling prints of their work, since this provides them with little tangible benefit except that conferred by mere distribution (e.g. greater recognition).
I can certainly see that this feedback effect ought to be more pronounced in the software field than in the Arts. (And it is precisely the desire to ensure that it is more pronounced that is at the center of the argument of advocates of the GPL over BSD-style software licenses.)
Still, while it may be irksome that someone else is making money selling prints of that photo I released under a CC license, surely a rational calculation is that I have lost nothing, for them having done so, as I decided to give the thing away for free, anyway.
Indeed, if my intention, in releasing the photo under the CC, was to gain the widest possible attention for my art, I should be happy that someone else also has a vested interest in seeing it widely disseminated.
That said, I have released at least one thing under a CC NC license. That’s because I happen to feel strongly it’s one subject I don’t think anyone should be making a profit on.
Anyway, it seems to me that there are circumstances in which commercial use might go against the purpose for which the work was released under a CC license. But these are probably rarer than the rather routine use of the NC clause would indicate.
Mark,
I think a large part of the popularity of NC licenses derives from an entry-level confusion in principles. People pushing for “free content” still mostly haven’t gotten the distinction between “free speech” and “free beer.” “Noncommercial” restrictions sound like a good idea if you think that the issue is whether the price of obtaining the content is or is not $0.00. They sound like an awful idea if you think the issue is what you can or cannot do with the content once you’ve obtained it. Many people who are choosing free content licenses are aware that big commercialized copy-monopolists are the problem, but make the mistake of identifying the commerce as the problem rather than the monopolistic privileges. Since people who consider themselves culturally and politically progressive tend to be at least suspicious of commercialism anyway, they’re quite likely to miss the more subtle but more important point about the means by which the copy-monopolists have extorted their money. In any case as long as the two different issues aren’t clearly distinguished, there won’t be a clear set of first principles behind “free content” communities.
Kurtiss,
This brings me to what I view as the CC philosophy, which is not “let’s be slightly less evil,” or to be “open source,” but to give the creator a choice! That choice is precisely what’s needed to create a rich ecosystem of commoners that can interact with existing copyright systems.
If CC is not aiming at providing open (free-as-in-speech) content, but rather in giving creative types more control over specifying the permission profile on their works, then they need a less misleading name. They should not be calling themselves “Creative Commons” or talking about “free culture,” if what they mean is “creative control” or “machine-readable general licensing syntax and semantics.” They should decide just what they are promoting (whether this is freeing content, or just minting new data structures for creative types to express the restrictions they do or do not place on licensed use), and then work from the clearer set of first principles.
— Rad Geek
Fascinating. This is one of the most interesting threads of conversation I’ve come across of late, and has changed my perception of the issues involved.
I edit things in Wikipedia under the GFDL, because like software, that is a collaborative act (I am only part of the whole). If I write a song, people can use the vocal track and create a backing, or they could do an instrumental remix, etc., but they wouldn’t be collaborating (I am the author and the whole). I hold that the two are seperate, and one inspires a sense of ownership more than the other does.
I think when the CC site asks if you want to permit “commercial use”, it’s easy to forget the sharealike clause exists. After reading this, I’m going to relicence most of the things I have under BY-SA. Cheers.
I have been thinking along the same lines. Not only does CC have a branding problem in terms of not having Freedom as in Free Software as a baseline feature of the licenses, they confused things for a long time by giving people boilerplate text that said “a Creative Commons license” as opposed to “the Creative Commons Attribution-Foobar 2.5 license”. At least this one now seems fixed.
Also, by letting everyone have their pet license features, Creative Commons makes network effects smaller by creating disjoint networks of legally compatible works. When I wrote a document encouraging Finns to use the American 2.5 series instead of the buggy Finnish 1.0 series, I counted that in the U.S. jurisdiction alone (ignoring all the iCommons licenses) CC has 26 licenses or license-like products. Some of them are compatible with each other, though.
One of the ironic things is that Lessig talks about the perils of the permission culture, which makes it expensive to do works that combine existing work, while at the same time some CC folks say how great it is to publish stuff under an NC license so that commercial users come and ask for permission.
BTW, Kurtiss, have you ever tried to analyze some potential use cases in terms of NC to see if they are allowed. It is really hard to figure out what NC actually means in practice, although on the surface it seems rather clear. And what it really means isn’t what some licensors think it means. CC has a complex guide about this, but it isn’t legally binding.
(I publish most of my photos under CC-by 2.0 and I published my paid blog posts this summer under CC-by-sa 2.5. I don’t publish all my writing under CC-by-sa 2.5, though, because I agree with Stallman that software-style freedom is not as appropriate for opinion pieces and I haven’t quite figured out what would be the right thing to do. I try to avoid NC.)
@RadGeek: From http://creativecommons.org/about/history:
Creative Commons is working to revive [balance, compromise, and moderation]. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses.
Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”
Now I’ve not read every piece of promotion, but I do not think CC’s literature regarding their licenses mentions “free culture”. In many ways, I feel this thread underscores an issue I’ve encountered in many libertarian debates. That is, Larry Lessig promotes liberal ideals (”Free Culture”, the book, etc.), while endorsing a project that does not promote an ideal, but enables choice. So CC enables the “free culture” you’re thinking of, but it also enables protection. I think the fact that these “orthogonal dimensions” (see above for caveats) exist enables an internal competition, a market, for creative works made free to varying degrees–the whole of which is a semi-permeable commons. It’s nucleus is responsible for interacting with standard copyright and traditional commerce. All works flow freely to the center (not necessarily the other way). Maybe that’s a “what the hell kind of commons,” but I think it’s one of the best efforts to shift a “debate [that] tends to the extremes,” and therefore, one of the most likely approaches to work. Personally, I vie for the non-WTH commons, and I hope that an efficient market of licenses tends toward the free culture most of us here want. I just think the best way to get there is by opening up choice and creating an efficient market, not promoting a single ideal. Why? Because I very well could be wrong. Only the market can tell.
As someone who regularly uses Flickr photographs, how the heck do you implement BY? I’m crediting the Flickr name, but that seems kind of stupid.
And the derivative work angle: I do standard cropping, contrast and color correction, and the like. I assume that does not count as a derivative work.
Not that it matters. The only sanction that is realistic in a copyright lawsuit for web use is an injunction not to do use it anymore, and if someone asked, I’d stop using it. Establishing damages for just using an image on the web is not easy, given actual case law up to now. A couple of the big stock photo companies are in the habit of asking for settlements, but they cleverly make the amounts roughly what your legal fees would be to challenge them, so it never ends up in court.
— Mark VII
As someone who regularly uses Flickr photographs, how the heck do you implement BY? I’m crediting the Flickr name, but that seems kind of stupid.
When I’ve run into this situation in the past I’ve cited the photographer’s Flickr username (if their real name is not available) and provided a link to their page on Flickr. Not ideal, perhaps, but it seems a reasonable “good faith effort” solution to comply with BY.
You wake up one day and discover that your riffs and hooks have been lifted and someone else is getting the cred. You’re scraping by and they’re making serious money. You go to Google and find that the effect of naive linking without background vetting creates an unchanging force vector that assigns the cred moreorless permanently to someone who merely read your posting or listened to your song or decompiled your code, then used it collaboratively to become its owner. It is system-sanctioned burglary.
PageRank enables sustainability to trump authority. To the one who burgles fast and is lauded for it goes the spoils. It not only legitimizes piracy, it makes it a way of life both in the systemic self-defense and in creating a false memory. Memory is not first observation, invention and citation, but gaming the search engine through manipulating those eigen value indices that create a false reward system.
A revolution will come but not the one you desire, Mark. Systems also devolve. Your motives are noble but the methods invert the outcome to create a generation of vipers.
— len
Len, I think that’s right, but when you remove the notion of spoils (reward system) completely, the argument breaks down. Hence Non-Commercial, Attribution, and Sharealike.
> As someone who regularly uses Flickr photographs, how the heck do you implement BY?
I used some CC-BY photos from Flickr in a recent video. I included a scrolling list of URLs at the end of the video, and also posted the full URL list in the transcript.
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/07/04/you-make-bunny-cry
— Mark
Kurtiss, I think that works in smaller networks of relationships, but at scale, it drives product value below the replenishment rate.
Making money on mp3.com drove a lot of people to game the system. Like targeted selection interviewing, one ends up with a lot of snakes in the chicken coop. I note the trend now for people to go mp3 file fishing to discover undiscovered artists. This will be an interesting test because so far what I see is where there is money to be made, the bad old music model reemerges quickly, but without the money, well, Adobe has yet to trade copies of Audition for copies of the mp3s.
— len
Kurtiss,
As far as the phrase “Free Culture” goes, while it’s true that Lawrence Lessig in particular is not identical with Creative Commons as an organization, I think it’s still the case that, given his extremely influential role with CC, the rhetoric he likes to employ in speech, writing, and titles — for example, “Free Culture” — can be fairly associated with the general temper of Creative Commons’ rhetoric and self-descriptions.
In any case, I don’t think you’ve answered my point. Giving your project a name such as “Creative Commons” conveys a particular impression of what your project is about. To wit, building a creative commons. To have a creative commons you actually need to make works available freely for common use (i.e. not limited to the proprietary control of the creator or copyright-holder). Many Creative Commons licenses — and NC licenses in particular — do not do that. Replying that CC actually aims at giving creators more precise control over the permission profiles on their works, rather than on making works freely available, does not answer the objection. If CC wants to focus on helping creators express precisely what sorts of general permissions they want to grant, and what sorts of control they want to exercise, then they can go right ahead and do that. But they ought to pick a less misleading name. Perhaps “Creative Control” or “The Content License Repository” or somesuch would do. “Creative Commons” does not, because it dilutes the idea of a commons and conflates it with restrictionist licenses (such as NC, or Founder’s Copyright), which do not actually put works in the commons. (They only “enclose” a smaller “plot,” or enclose it for a shorter time, than conventional copyright arrangements do.)
I just think the best way to get there is by opening up choice and creating an efficient market, not promoting a single ideal. Why? Because I very well could be wrong. Only the market can tell.
Just to be clear, I don’t think that any form of unilateral copyright restrictions (as a form of State-enforced monopoly) are compatible with free markets, efficient markets, or market choice. (Cf. [1] and [2] for the whys and hows). But the point of my remarks does not actually depend on that claim. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I think that *-NC licenses (for example) are a good idea, or legitimate from the standpoint of individual rights. The point is, rather, that it’s misleading to pass yourself off as advocates for a Creative Commons if you’re also promoting licenses that restrict Freedom 0. If that’s part of what they want to promote, fine, but it’s not a commons, and they ought to reconsider how they’re trying to brand themselves.
— Rad Geek
In some sense, all music recordings, regardless of copyright or other license, are more like free software than not-free software, e.g., they’re “open source” and they’ll be freely “copied” in other music recordings.
Because of this, the regulation of more literal copying (e.g., sampling, file sharing, derrivative works), is like the application of a second license–creating something more akin to MySQL’s dual GPL / commerical license.
It’s a rough analogy, but I mean to suggest that the dynamic between licenses and freedom and “the commons” is different with music than with software. And, in particular, the extent to which copyright allows music and software to be locked-out of the commons is different–and seems to warrant different degrees of counter-measure.
As another tact, I think it’s important to support some semblance of fair use of music, etc. (And the CC Sampling license, IMO, attempts to make up for the absence of this support.) Fair use isn’t restricted by any commercial / non-commerical terms.
Oh no, not this “debate” again.
This “non-commercial is not FREE” thing was covered thousands of times. I even wrote an article (in French) promoting the use of “libre diffusion” to qualify all open licences used for non-software work.
If someone want to check it out, here it is (published on a free-softare website):
http://www.framasoft.net/article320.html
Points such as “issues are different” and “the free software movement has NO monopoly on the adjective free” have already been made. I tried to develop them in a sensible way, but I really don’t feel like going over it once again.
I know a lot of artists who are “free culture” activists from before Creative Commons was even founded. You may find a few of them on Dogmazic.net, for example. But if you post about this “non-commercial licences are not free” issue on the forums of Dogmazic.net (mostly French, but some of them are English-speaking ones), the answer you might get is “Shut the fuck up, we’re fed up with the likes of you already”. Not very diplomatic, but I understand the feelings AND reasoning behind it.
By the way, Dogmazic.net ( http://www.dogmazic.net ) is a website as important in France as Jamendo. They do have licence-based search (although it’s less ergonomic that what you may find on a company’s website such as Jamendo). Lots of interesting music there.
Dogmazic.net used to be Musique-Libre.org (Musique Libre = Free (as in freedom) Music, of course).
/* In the last part of this comment I had started to write why “restrictive” licenses are not evil, and why that infamous 2/3 ratio should not be despised, but after writing a few paragraphs I was like “Oh well it’s pointless anyway”, so I erased it all. Being a user and promoter of free software (I use GNU/linux on a daily basis), I always feel bad about free software activists bashing everything that is NOT FREE ENOUGH. Or WORSE, REGRETTING that artists wouldn’t understand that they should do REAL FREE art. Give me a break. */
Which part of “You should choose a license that you’re comfortable with” didn’t you understand?
— Mark
Okay, so I’m convinced that taking the ‘NC’ off my Flickr photos is a good idea.
I wonder why Flickr doesn’t allow me to make my photos PD?
— Robert Brook
We’re in the process of developing a CC-licensed feature film, the project A Swarm of Angels has over 700+ subscribers now. A few people email me to tell me they would sign if the license was without the NC clause (one today pointed me to this blog post), but after extensive discussion on the forums, I am even more convinced the proposed CC-NC-SA 2.5 with the addition of Sampling Plus (which allows commercial use of small parts of the whole) is the right way to go.
As many have mentioned above the idea of a totally free license has its problems transferring to the arts area as opposed to software.
Our movie project may not be free enough for a few people, but for most it is a giant step toward a more liberated P2P-friendly, shareable, and remixable movie - a world away from the DRM-restrictions of Hollywood (and ensuring those same media companies can’t automatically exploit it for themselves).
More support for projects like ours will get you closer to the utopia some of you crave…
— Matt
> More support for projects like ours will get you closer to the utopia some of you crave…
No, it won’t, but thanks for dropping by.
— Mark
Mark, what do you think of Poul-Henning Kamp’s Beerware license? If I ever publish any of my own software, I plan on using (at least a derivative of) it:
/*
* —————————————————————————-
* “THE BEER-WARE LICENSE” (Revision 42):
* <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
* can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
* this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
* —————————————————————————-
*/
— Adam
As someone who eventually came to Ubuntu from a long and convoluted web path that started from seeing a creative commons by-nc-sa license which led into investigating open source software, I find that having the choice, the multitude of choices is much clearer to me in CC than in the GPL or other open source license. CC works great for creative works, but from what I understand it doesn’t work well at all for code (the CC even states this). And as an end user and content creator (who has no idea about coding), there are times when I want NC, and there are times when I want BY, and there are times I want BY-SA (my favorite option). The BY-SA is for my own stuff mostly, but when there are other people involved with their likenesses, it’s safer to use at least an NC unless you get releases. I don’t understand the problem with the choices. To me it’s better to have them than the yes/no copyright mess we were stuck with. The licenses work for me. Including NC. Both CC and FOSS licenses are useful for their areas. It’s where they intersect that it gets messy, and what CC has been working on. I respectfullly disagree with you about NC being overly restrive. It allows for fun mashups without hurting a creator’s commercial works. It’s a good choice for that sort of thing.
Just an opinion from someone who uses computers as means to an end, rather than work on or create for them.
— cainmark
Opps. “restrictive” not “restive”
— cainmark