Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org) [LWN.net]

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)
In reply to: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org) by Cyberax
Parent article: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

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.

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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) [Link]

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) [Link]

> 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) [Link]

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?