Brockmeier: Anti-rantifesto: Why free software and free culture aren't the same

I guess I have no idea what you mean by "fair game" (it's now clear that you're not talking about fair use). CCSA-style licenses require you to accurately show authorship, be clear that you've made changes, etc.

I am aware of that. I have made photos available under such terms, although admittedly I slapped an NC on the end.

Best I can tell, you're now talking about some hypothetical world where people are allowed to ignore the licenses on photos and prose but not software? Or maybe all photos and prose are required to be in the public domain?

No, I am talking about the real world where people might distribute software under copyleft terms but don't feel that they can share a photographic record of their life under the same terms, even if they might want to share that record with others. I certainly don't see that they should be called a hypocrite for that. I'm not even sure that someone who always distributes their software under permissive licences should be regarded as a hypocrite for not doing the same with their own content.

Neither of those sound like very useful scenarios to speculate about, and they're certainly not what Nina Paley was advocating.

Copyleft is all about building a basis for collaboration. Thus, all those arguments about whether licensing stuff under the GPL is fair on other people who build on such work (and claim that they wrote the bulk of the finished product and should decide the final licence) rarely change people's minds because those people don't accept the premise of the thing in the first place. I would think that some artists wouldn't see why people would want to collaborate around their work, which they would regard as a finished article. I wouldn't argue that such artists are generating free content, however.

You can claim that people who receive content might not need to actively collaborate around such content, but might want a reasonable set of privileges that permit them to transform the content in practical ways. That gets us onto discussing the integrity of a work and whether it can be realistically preserved while allowing operations which change it in various ways. Whether content with "integrity restrictions" can be considered free content is debatable, but I would think not.

Nina Paley's biggest problems are ND (no derivatives) and NC (non-commercial), and I would argue that the bigger of the two problems is ND. As most of us already know, there is a degree of liability or insecurity when building or collaborating around non-free software where ND dictates what can be done. The danger is that people are often led to trivialise the issues because they "got the software for free" or "it's a free download" or whatever, yet the software fills a functional gap and a genuinely free alternative appears unnecessary. A community can be left stranded in an unsustainable situation if that non-free component is no longer usable or available. And I suppose that a "creative community" would be similarly affected if they based a set of works on a similarly non-free image, for example.

What I take issue with is that people are labelled hypocrites for regarding software and content differently. The fact is that they do, and people would be better off trying to understand this (and the general reluctance of people to contribute to the free content commons) if they ever want to see NC and ND disappear from the free content scene. An example: I doubt that people would ever want to use my software or even "big name" software to promote forms of alternative medicine, yet I have been asked if someone could use a photo of mine to do just that. I said no.

As I noted before, the ethical issues around sharing content confront many more people directly and have an impact at many more levels, like it or not.