WOS4: Lawrence Lessig on read/write culture

Posted Sep 20, 2006 19:58 UTC (Wed) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]

Lesseg's talk was all about the importance of enabling Read/Write (i.e. participatory) culture. He also made a point of mentioning the successful penetration of the CC licenses, with a nice graph showing a dramatic growth in link-backs to the licenses.

So it's only natural for someone whos heard this to wonder "What portion of the use is licenses such as CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-ND... licenses which fundamentally inhibit read write culture".

I was able to walk to to him after his talk at Wikimania and pose that question... It is unfortunate that the room didn't get to hear his answer, because he was clearly read for it and wasted no time cutting right to the truth:

2/3rds.

So much for read/write culture.

The sad fact of the matter is that people don't consider the long term implications of their licensing decisions. ... Nor should most of them...

If they want to make their content *FREE* then we should be suggesting to them licensing which will make it free in *ALL* manners which are important to our society.

Sure.. authors should be able to choose. But if they've chosen to be free we shouldn't give them 'half free'. The effort to make sure that folks who think they want something not quite free are given easy choices is resulting in less free content. Okay sure.. CC-BY-NC-ND is more free in theory than "all rights reserved", but exactly what is the license permitting that everyone wouldn't already be doing?

The world is in desperate need of a license brand that actually translates into free content... and I think that it's unfortunate that Creative Commons is unwilling to be that brand.

Lets hope that the free software foundation continues to execute the good
judgment that have with GPLv3 for their next version of the GFDL.