[PD] a little ot: creative commons

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jun 15, 2006, at 11:50 AM, august wrote:

>>> Interestingly some other people put it into words:
>>> http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Freedoms-Standard-Advanced
>>> http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/entry-20050920.html
>>
>> The problem is that we tend to believe that CC licenses are either  
>> all good
>> or all bad. A licence is not a trademark. CC is not a license, its an
>> experimental legal framework to challenge the traditional  
>> conception of
>> copyright. The GPL is endorsed by CC, but the FSF is pissed off  
>> because the
>> CC is not an ideological movement, it's a place where lawyers and the
>> general public can have some fun, together. The CC initiative is  
>> fine, as
>> long as we take the time to understand their (easy) licenses.
>
>
> I think a greater problem is that we tend to think of GPL and CC as
> being similar things, when in fact they are quite different.
>
> But, I'm not so sure the CC is not an ideological movement.  It's just
> that it's not as totalitarian as the FLOSS/GPL movement.
>
> CC addresses the production of culture, the GPL address
> the production of code.   They are two very different intentions, two
> very different "things".
>
> And, despite being a FLOSS advocate and avid FLOSS programmer since  
> many years,
> I take particular offense to this article:
>
> 	http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Freedoms-Standard-Advanced
>
> Mako Hill only wishes to extend the naive tautology of the word  
> "freedom", and
> knock CC for not having an ideology that is as simple and total as  
> the GPL.

People talk of freedom and its hard to make concrete but there are  
real, concrete effects.  Lawrence Lessig is definitely a lawyer and  
lawyers usually believe that the law works.  But few lawyers realize  
that the law is really, really expensive.  Richard Stallman is a  
hacker and was looking for something that actually works.  Therefore  
the GNU GPL uses the law get rid of as much of the law as possible.

For example, you put your song out with a Non-Commercial CC license,  
then some big company uses it anyway.  Are you going to pay 1-2  
months of your salary to enforce the license and make that  
corporation stop using your song?  That's the reality. Here's an  
example:

http://unraveled.com/archives/2004/05/enforcing_the_creative_commons

CC won't help you enforce your license:

http://creativecommons.org/ 
faq#Will_Creative_Commons_help_me_enforce_my_license?

The FSF regularly helps enforce against GNU GPL violations.  The core  
idea is that the GNU GPL allows you to share your code yet be  
guaranteed to always have control over it, and to benefit from other  
people's improvements to your code.  The CC licenses have a bunch of  
clauses that sound good, but unless you are going to fork over a lot  
of money, they are not enforceable.

.hc

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Computer science is no more related to the computer than astronomy is  
related to the telescope.      -Edsger Dykstra