Please no. CC licenses are great - they provide choice.
CC-NC would be improved by allowing 'incidental' commercial use (i.e. if you repost an image on a private blog with ads).
CC-ND is fine as it is. For example, as an author I might _not_ want other people using my universe for their works. CC-ND provides a nice legally vetted way to do it.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 27, 2012 22:35 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
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The argument isn't that these licenses should go away. The argument is that associating them with the other Creative Commons licenses implies a false level of equivalence and makes the "Creative Commons" term useless.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 4:56 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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CC licenses are great because they provide a continuous spectrum of licenses: from "barely free" to "one step short of public domain". That's their greatest value - authors can start with the most restrictive license and then perhaps upgrade to more a free license. Even Cory Doctorow started this way.
So restricting choices by killing some license variations would be a bad idea.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 9:02 UTC (Tue) by Otus (guest, #67685)
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> The argument isn't that these licenses should go away. The argument is
> that associating them with the other Creative Commons licenses implies a
> false level of equivalence and makes the "Creative Commons" term useless.
I agree with the argument. If you can't modify something "creative" is
misleading; if you can only use something non-commercially "commons" is.
There is probably a place for both kinds of licenses (e.g. ND for political
or other opinion pieces), but those works shouldn't be labeled with the
"Creative Commons" label, IMHO.
why use ND for political/opinion works?
Posted Aug 28, 2012 14:14 UTC (Tue) by dkg (subscriber, #55359)
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Otus wrote:
There is probably a place for both kinds of licenses (e.g. ND for political or other opinion pieces)
Could someone explain this last bit for me? I've heard it from several places, but i don't see why ND is any more reasonable for political or opinion works than it is for other works.
If the argument is that you don't want someone to put words in your mouth by changing your text, then the focus should be on misattribution, which isn't covered by these licenses anyway. A derived work still needs to clearly and correctly indicate who the authors are. To do otherwise on an opinion piece (e.g. one that says "I think ...") in an adversarial context is either fraud or libel or both. The license of the work isn't relevant.
OTOH, if Alice writes an incisive bit of political commentary, and Bob likes it but maybe
doesn't care about certain parts of it, or
has publication space limits that prevent reproducing the work in full, or
wants to flesh out a particular angle in more detail, or
wants to make it more accessible to a different audience, or
any other nuance or cleanup...
Then why on earth wouldn't Alice want Bob to produce a derivative work to help advance the main argument?
And if Bob disagrees with Alice, his derivative work is likely to pick apart her arguments while quoting them, or parody them, both of which are already protected by Fair Use AIUI. So even if you think using the license to protect yourself from counterarguments would be a good thing (i don't, personally), the ND clause doesn't provide this protection.
So why do people say ND is somehow appropriate for political or opinion pieces?
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 1:52 UTC (Tue) by mikemol (subscriber, #83507)
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I more or less agree.
My content on Flickr is pretty much all CC-By, and gets used by dozens of websites every year. Despite this, I occasionally get requests by various publications for permission to use that same content.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 3:13 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048)
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> CC-NC would be improved by allowing 'incidental' commercial use (i.e. if you repost an image on a private blog with ads).
Presenting works in conjunction with ads is _by far_ the most significant method of monetizing works online, especially the long-tail of smaller "non feature" works.
Many people are significantly confused about these licenses, and the equivalent presentation creates constant problems for people who care about getting things Freely licensed. Many people choose "non commercial" because it sounds good and they're visualizing and particular kind of exploitation which pretty much never happens and can't be excluded without also excluding a bunch of things which are mostly agreeable but clearly commercial.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 4:25 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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Yes, and?
I have several photos that became quite popular. They were reprinted on numerous blogs. I don't mind that authors of that blogs might get a fraction of a penny based on ads served on pages with my images.
However, I mind when a picture aggregator grabs all my works and reprints them with lots of ads. Or if a for-profit journal wants to print them or use in advertisement.
That's why I'd want a license that clearly delineates these two cases. The current CC licenses are close enough, but not perfect.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 4:37 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048)
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And there are other people who don't want blogs making any money at all off something using their work (they'd prefer to get a cut of that usage, for example; or they are philosophically opposed to commercial activity of all/some forms), never-mind the drafting difficulties which distinguish a private blog and an aggregation which is trying to look like a private block for license evasion^woptimization purposes.
Of course, you could easily create a license which accomplishes this. It isn't some great dark art. But you shouldn't because license diversity is a social cost which should be minimized.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 4:42 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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I don't insist that the fix should be retroactive, I'm totally fine with completely non-commercial CC license version.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 9:52 UTC (Tue) by Company (guest, #57006)
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What he wants is a license that's essentially a "How I feel about it today" kind of license.
Which is exactly how the Open Source licenses got started, too, before they went through the process of becoming the clear-cut no-compromise things they are today. And it's now fine for Microsoft to make buillions of dollars with it, for the USA to monitor their citizens or for Al Qaida to build nuclear warheads with it.
But: I can use the code and I'm very clear about what I can do with it. And I can't use the photos, because a "CC" sign doesn't tell me anything and even the term "non-commercial" is so vague.
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 8:20 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
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In the typical case of such a grabber, do you think that the attribution requirements would have been met?
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 5:50 UTC (Tue) by ekj (guest, #1524)
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Agreed. People choose -NC because they think (for example) that they'd prefer if their photos wheren't used in advertising-campaigns, but actually end up making the photos unusable on some tiny personal blog, because the blog has advertising (which doesn't even cover the hosting-costs)
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 10:09 UTC (Tue) by wertigon (guest, #42963)
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Non-Commercial does not mean no profit. It means do not use this work for the explicit and sole purpose of making money on it. So yes, if your blog is the digital equivalent of a newspaper then it's commercial. If it's just your own blog with some ads to soften the blow of hosting, then no, it's not commercial.
Of course, IANAL, so could be wrong, but that's how it works in socialist Europe. :)
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 30, 2012 9:08 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524)
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According to the CC-licenses in question, commercial means:
"in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation."
That's a far shot from your claimed "explicit and sole purpose", "primarily" is very different from "solely", and the license does not cover only monetary compensation, but also "commercial advantage".
Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
Posted Aug 28, 2012 16:04 UTC (Tue) by lambda (subscriber, #40735)
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I'm curious; has anyone ever actually enforced a CC-NC or CC-ND license, in a case that wouldn't be adequately covered by a CC-SA license (such as a straight ripoff with no credit or incorporating the work into something non-free)?
I ask because while I understand the argument for the NC and ND licenses in theory, I wonder if there is any evidence that they actually do what they intend in practice.