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 22:31 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (15 responses)

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) [Link] (3 responses)

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) [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 (subscriber, #67685) [Link] (1 responses)

> 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?

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 1:52 UTC (Tue) by mikemol (guest, #83507) [Link]

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 (guest, #30048) [Link] (8 responses)

> 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) [Link] (4 responses)

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 (guest, #30048) [Link] (2 responses)

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) [Link]

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) [Link]

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) [Link]

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) [Link] (2 responses)

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) [Link] (1 responses)

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) [Link]

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) [Link]

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.

ND is important for polemic works

Posted Aug 28, 2012 7:41 UTC (Tue) by Psychonaut (guest, #86437) [Link] (3 responses)

I think including an ND variant is important for works which are polemic rather than purely informational. For example, if some person or group writes a political manifesto, they may want it distributed as widely as possible, and thus allow redistribution and commercial use. They will probably also want their name associated with that manifesto. What they do not want is someone else to take that manifesto, change the text slightly so that it advocates distasteful or diametrically opposed ideas, and then redistribute the modified version while preserving the original authors' names in the credits. This makes it seem as though the original authors are promoting the ideas contained in the modified manifesto, particularly if the modifier has (deliberately or otherwise) credited them conspicuously. The modifier need not even have bad intentions in doing so; perhaps his intent was not to embarrass the original authors but simply to reuse what he thought was very good prose and very good arguments.

Of course, this is a potential problem even with non-polemic texts; I could find some CC-licensed software manual or Wikipedia article written by some famous figure, incorporate parts of it into a distasteful manifesto, and then release it with the innocent authors' names attached to it. But I think such scenarios are less likely to occur simply because it's more difficult to attach opinions and calls to action to a purely informational text than to one which is already polemic.

ND is important for polemic works

Posted Aug 28, 2012 8:18 UTC (Tue) by thumperward (guest, #34368) [Link]

That's precisely the reasoning behind the various non-free provisions in the GFDL, which were designed to ensure that the FSF's message was fully and accurately conveyed in its distributed publications.

In practice this hasn't been necessary. It is *possible* that a malicious actor can take a program distributed under the GPL, for instance, insert blatant bugs and misfeatures, and attempt to pass it off as the original author's work. Maybe if we still lived in a world where software and books were distributed exclusively by couriers lugging large brown parcels around that might be more effective, but in practice it doesn't happen. There is little evidence to suggest that the GFDL's non-free provisions have prevented a real problem.

As as the original piece says, if you can't build on a work then it isn't part of the commons anyway. So why is it a CC licence at all? As it isn't part of the commons, the author need not care for interoperability in the slightest, so it's a waste of time to have a standard licence.

ND is important for polemic works

Posted Aug 28, 2012 9:05 UTC (Tue) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link]

All the CC licenses are supposed to deal with that problem:

"Attribution - You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the
author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you
or your use of the work)."

ND is important for polemic works

Posted Aug 28, 2012 14:21 UTC (Tue) by dkg (subscriber, #55359) [Link]

Please see my comment above about ND and opinion pieces -- what you're describing is either fraud or libel or both; the ND clause in the license isn't necessary to protect against fraud or libel. And the ND clause actively discourages collaborative work by your political allies. This seems like a net loss to me for anyone with serious political commitment to the subject of their work.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 8:40 UTC (Tue) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link]

I was intrigued, but on reading their article it seems to be that they want the Creative Commons' goals to be the same as theirs.

Which would be a great shame.

The Creative Commons does indeed want more free culture - but they recognise that copyright maximalism has taken us to a point where most people don't understand licensing, and most licenses are reduced to a tiny printing of "all rights reserved". (Which most people will never see anyway, so they'll assume whatever's most convenient for their purposes.)

By making licensing easy, and encouraging licensing to be more visible, even the more restrictive licences benefit free culture, because it becomes easier to discern the author's intent.

As both a supporter of the Creative Commons and a user of their licences, I would rather we keep the -NC and -ND options. I don't see that they harm free or non-free culture.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 9:59 UTC (Tue) by dcoutts (guest, #5387) [Link] (25 responses)

It seems to me that CC BY-ND is quite appropriate for academic work, and it would be good to have academic work included under free culture.

I recently published my PhD thesis under the CC BY-ND license. It seems pretty reasonable and matches the academic culture in which it's fine to share papers around but not for other authors to make slight changes and republish like we do with software. Indeed making slight changes and republishing would be considered quite bad.

I read the article they link to "Why ND Is Neither Necessary Nor Sufficient To Prevent Misrepresentation" but for academic works it's not misrepresentation that people would worry about. It'd be taking a paper, making some changes, adding a third author (so keeping attribution to the existing authors) and then republishing. It would be unclear who had done what. By contract with the normal academic approach of quoting and citing it's always very clear.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 10:21 UTC (Tue) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link]

> It'd be taking a paper, making some changes, adding a third author (so keeping attribution to the existing authors) and then republishing. It would be unclear who had done what. By contract with the normal academic approach of quoting and citing it's always very clear.

Academics don't work this way because copyright law forbids alternatives. I think social mores are important to consider. In academia just adding yourself as an author and republishing a modified essay without significant explanation would be frowned upon, regardless of whether it was technically allowed.

I'm sure many 'open access' journals have licenses that would technically allow this kind of practise, but the reason you haven't seen it happening are that they'd *damage* the reputation of the person, not enhance it.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 12:38 UTC (Tue) by reddit (guest, #86331) [Link] (16 responses)

Except that it also potentially prevents things like reusing images and graphs, or doing extensive selective quoting that might not be covered by fair use.

In general, licenses force others to include the original copyright and license notice in derivative works, and some like the GPL also force others to include a list of changes.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 15:23 UTC (Tue) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link] (15 responses)

Except that it also potentially prevents things like reusing images and graphs, or doing extensive selective quoting that might not be covered by fair use.

That is an apparent benefit but it of less use than it would first seem. Academic research work is supposed to be original work. The importance of being able to copy graphs or images is therefore limited.

I'm also not a fan of people even just copying "common" images - this tends to just allow errors and out dated thinking to propagate in your field.

If you need to re-use a graph, for example to plot against your own work you really need the underlying data and papers are not a good medium for exchanging this information. g3data can be your friend but the problem of archiving experimental data, or numerical simulation results as opposed to the high level analysis and interpretation is far from solved.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 18:46 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (11 responses)

but you aren't just preventing the graphs from being used in other academic works.

you are preventing them from being used by bloggers who think you have something important to say and want to use your graph on their blog.

and you are preventing a newspaper from printing your graph as part of a story.

you are preventing someone from using your graph in a powerpoint presentation to some audience that would never take the time to go find and read your academic paper on their own.

Are all these limits really worth whatever benefits you think you are getting by using copyright to prevent other researchers from trying to pass your research off as their own? (which would not be allowed anyway with the attribution requirements)

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 19:02 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (9 responses)

You CAN use a graph from some paper under CC-ND with proper attribution, that's covered by fair use.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 20:20 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (7 responses)

Not all jurisdictions have fair use.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 20:55 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Then introduce provisions for it in the license text.

BTW, what jurisdictions actually forbid citations for academic purposes?

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 21:53 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

What jurisdictions forbid academic citation? The UK for one, I'm pretty certain!

In jurisdictions without fair use, the law tends to be black and white. Even a quote is - technically - a copyright violation. And while I vaguely remember something about the law changing recently, as far as I am aware, ANY copying without explicit permission of one form or another is a copyright violation in the UK.

Oh - and as to the person going on about libel and misrepresentation - you are not considering other countries. The US and UK are diametrically opposed in their implementation of libel law ... what works in one is highly unlikely to work in the other. And in the UK libel law is *totally* *ineffective* for, let's say, 95% of the population.

Cheers,
Wol

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 22:30 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

So how do academics work in the UK?

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 7:55 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (1 responses)

> So how do academics work in the UK?

The same way they do elsewhere. I don't know Wol's claim on the illegality of citation is true, but in practise it's treated sensibly; quoting a limited amount, with attribution, is expected and practised widely.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 12:56 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

"treated sensibly". Of course.

If an academic sued for copyright violation because another academic quoted him without permission, he'd probably win.

But in the long (and even short) term he'd probably lose big as his career tanked. Academics live by other academics quoting them. So even if it's technically illegal they can't sue as it would be professional death.

Cheers,
Wol

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 7:52 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not aware of any jurisdictions that forbid citations (but IANAL, etc), but re-using a graph wouldn't be considered citation in the fields I'm familiar with.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:20 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Citing a graph from a paper is fine in my field (biotechnology), if this graph is a subject for further analysis, for example.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2012 20:26 UTC (Tue) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

In what jurisdictions?

Do note that states write their own copyright exceptions. My state, The Republic of Iceland, allows* unlimited verbatim copying for private non-commercial use. I reckon some don't.

* This does now not apply to protected (DRM'd) software. Thank you, EEA.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:31 UTC (Wed) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link]

Are all these limits really worth whatever benefits you think you are getting by using copyright to prevent other researchers from trying to pass your research off as their own? (which would not be allowed anyway with the attribution requirements)

Those are good arguments for allowing derivative works of academic graphs - my point was re-use of articles doesn't help research work much.

I'm not convinced that copyright gives academic authors a net benefit at all. In practise people will use your graphs in their powerpoint presentation even if you put "all rights reserved". I am however a big fan of reading the license that you put your work under and standing by it! So if you think that "re-mixing" academic publications is a bad idea allowing it in the license you use to publish is sending the wrong message.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 14:05 UTC (Wed) by reddit (guest, #86331) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, obviously the use would be for books, Wikipedia articles or other kinds of material designed to teach the knowledge contained in the research paper to a wide audience.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:56 UTC (Wed) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link]

O.k. but the underlying data is still more important. Otherwise your textbook or Wiki article is going to be a jumbled mess. Authors use different symbols on graphs to mean the same thing (for example) and you rapidly end up with a confusing mess of different symbols...

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 30, 2012 1:44 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I think you greatly underestimate the usefulness of copying some kinds of figures. In my field, one of the most common kinds of figures is a schematic representation of an experiment. Some researchers focus on method development and others on applying those methods to more interesting problems. When somebody comes up with a really useful method, it's very common for lots of other researchers to apply the same basic method to a whole host of problems. After a while, the method becomes so well known that people don't need to explain it in depth, but until that happens it would be very useful for people using the method to be able to copy the schematic explanation from the ones who developed it.

I also think that literal copying is probably better as a way of avoiding errors than having each person who wants to reuse a figure create their own version from scratch. Literal copying will only reproduce errors from the original, but copying by recreating the figure will tend to reproduce those errors and provide an opportunity to introduce new errors when the copy is badly done.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 8:59 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (5 responses)

> I read the article they link to "Why ND Is Neither Necessary Nor
> Sufficient To Prevent Misrepresentation" but for academic works it's not
> misrepresentation that people would worry about. It'd be taking a paper,
> making some changes, adding a third author (so keeping attribution to the
> existing authors) and then republishing. It would be unclear who had done
> what. By contract with the normal academic approach of quoting and citing
> it's always very clear.

Yeah, it is somewhat of a dilemma. If you can freely remix a research paper, you can definitely create situations where it is not clear who did what. You could even introduce falsehoods that might seem like they were the work of the original author. So maybe CC-BY-ND is the right thing to do here.

The confusing thing about all of this to me is that research papers are all _supposed_ to be derivative works of each other, at least in theory. Standing on the shoulder of giants, and all that. However, I imagine that the courts choose to interpret one research paper citing another (even a lengthy cite) as not creating a derived work-- otherwise academia would grind to a halt amidst copyright disputes. I imagine this is covered under fair use.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 19:21 UTC (Wed) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]

> The confusing thing about all of this to me is that research papers are all _supposed_ to be derivative works of each other, at least in theory. Standing on the shoulder of giants, and all that. However, I imagine that the courts choose to interpret one research paper citing another (even a lengthy cite) as not creating a derived work-- otherwise academia would grind to a halt amidst copyright disputes. I imagine this is covered under fair use.

As Wol pointed out, litigation would be career suicide, but the bigger reason that this never happens is that academics have very little respect for copyright law anyway. This is party due to the "standing on the shoulders of giants" attitude scientists tend to have have, but exacerbated by the borderline theft perpetrated by the textbook publishers, the anti-science policies of the likes of Elseveir, and the innate sense of injustice one gets watching the MAFIAA literally destroying lives.

The amount of flagrant copyright violation that goes on in private between academics is staggering (photocopying entire chapters of textbooks, emailing PDF's of copyrighted books). This behaviour is encouraged by many, not just for convenience's sake, but as a form of protest.

One professor I knew, who seemed to have more respect for the law than most, had a textbook publisher release a new version of an introductory statistics textbook, which had no real changes, other than to jack the price up to over $200. His response was to turn his course notes into his own textbook, which is CC-licensed and sold by the university bookstore for roughly the cost of printing.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Sep 3, 2012 11:05 UTC (Mon) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link] (3 responses)

Well research works are supposed to bring something new to the table: data, algorithms, analysis etc. Although you may be building on he shoulders of giants, you are not simply cutting and pasting the material....

It also depends what you mean by "cite". In my experience this means providing a reference which the reader can then see what the original paper was. Although the meaning of words varies considerably across different academic disciplines this is what the Bibtex \cite command does....

In my field it is rare that lengthy quotations or even figures from other works are included for no other reason that this reduces the space you have to discuss your own work.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Sep 5, 2012 3:17 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

"Bringing something new to the table" doesn't make something not a derived work.

> In my field it is rare that lengthy quotations or even figures
> from other works are included for no other reason that this
> reduces the space you have to discuss your own work.

That makes sense, I suppose.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Sep 5, 2012 5:44 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

all of science is "derived work" adding to the existing knowledge and theories.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Sep 5, 2012 6:16 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>It also depends what you mean by "cite". In my experience this means providing a reference which the reader can then see what the original paper was. Although the meaning of words varies considerably across different academic disciplines this is what the Bibtex \cite command does....

For example, overlaying your data set over a graph from another paper is pretty common. It can be done for a lot of legitimate reasons: to illustrate improvements of new methods, to highlight errors in previous works, etc.

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Posted Aug 29, 2012 12:04 UTC (Wed) by kirkengaard (guest, #15022) [Link]

You folks may be talking about web redistribution, and the question whether page ads are commercial use, but I have always understood the NC attribute as a matter of restricting the right to publication—by which I mean real publication. As an academic, I have a need to control the publication of my dissertation in book form, because it will affect my career. And perhaps that says that CC isn't for me, and I should simply know that in advance, if the "non-commercial" restriction is actually useless. But it's not an unreal consideration.

While anecdote isn't the singular of data, here's an example of why:
http://chronicle.com/article/Dissertation-for-Sale-A/132401/