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I believe the RIAA has no jurisdiction here

Violate my copyright???? You *will* be hearing from my lawyers. :)

Oh, all right. Ahem, "I do hereby release my earlier post under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license." Actually, I really don't care about attribution, but they took away that variation because it wasn't very popular.

Dvorak hasn't responded to mine. Pity.

So what's the difference between the creative commons and saying "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use."

The difference is that "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use." is less legally-precise than this, CC's "legal code" version of this. Your short version is a pointer to their long version that happens to be much more defensible in courts worldwide.

So what's the difference between the creative commons and saying "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use."

The difference is that "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use." is less legally-precise than this, CC's "legal code" version of this. Your short version is a pointer to their long version that happens to be much more defensible in courts worldwide.

So what's the difference between the creative commons and saying "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use."

The difference is that "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use." is less legally-precise than this, CC's "legal code" version of this. Your short version is a pointer to their long version that happens to be much more defensible in courts worldwide.

Here it is.

Why, does it say it's a 'license' in anyway? Why no, it doesn't, because it's not. It's a dedication. It's a way to say you are placing something in the public domain. That is, in fact, the legal term for placing a non-expired copyrighted work in the public domain, you 'dedicate' it to the public domain.

It also add that, as far as you know, you own the copyright to the work, or it is already public domain, which is something copyright law requires in a dedication.

And that you know exactly what 'Public Domain' means, that you are giving up any rights to it you or your heir might have, which is not required by copyright law, but cuts down on the lawyers.

Yes, you can, in theory, say 'Copyright 2005 John Smith, released into the public domain'. But you'd be amazed how many people don't know what 'public domain' means.

If that's the case, people should never call it 'Creative Comons: Public Domain' If you are putting those limitations on it, it is not public domain.

The work's legal status isn't "Creative Commons Public Domain"; it's "public domain", meaning no enforceable copyright. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication is just a convenient tool to let an author specify that no copyright will be enforced on a given work.

Yes, that's one way to look at it. I always looked at it as a family of licenses, kind of like what the Free Software Foundation calls "Free Software Licenses." If a license meets certain conditions regarding redistribution -- free for non-commercial use at the like -- it can be called a Creative Commons License. This is why a work can be legitimately called "Creative Commons Public Domain."

Mr. Dvorak doesn't understand two simple points:

1. These minimal conditions have no bearing on other conditions. For instance, just because a particular license grants free redistribution for non-commercial entities doesn't mean it does it for non-commercial entities only.
2. Fair use is not at issue here, because copyright law guarantees (I hate that fucking word) the freedom to use any copyrighted work in a manner fair to both copyright holder and user. For instance, I can take an excerpt out of any copyrighted work and use it in a review. So can PC Magazine, a commercial entity. In effect, the a Creative Commons license grants the user freedoms that traditionally aren't considered fair.

Considering how even a short visit to http://www.creativecommons.org/ clarifies both these issues, I can only suspect that Mr. Dvorak is being wilfully ignorant for the sake of drawing page views to his miserable little website. I'm sure he has a small penis too.

Is he [Dvorak] just dissing on CC or all open source licenses [...]

I certainly hope this is not the start of trying to give the open source movement more credit for work it did not do. Creative Commons licenses are not licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative and for good reason. CC licenses are not to be used for computer software. The Creative Commons organization lists the GNU GPL and GNU LGPL as licenses to consider for software. People on /. routinely cite the GPL as an "open source" license despite that:

• the Open Source Initiative merely lists the GNU GPL as an approved license. This is nothing compared to writing the license,
• the GNU GPL was written many years before the open source movement began and is therefore clearly independent of the open source movement,
• the GNU GPL talks about software freedom -- a different philosophy than the open source movement holds -- and the open source movement takes pains to avoid discussing software freedom,
• and the GNU GPL was written by the Free Software Foundation, not the Open Source Initiative. Richard Stallman, the GPL's chief author, takes every opportunity to clarify that he is not now nor has he ever been a member of the open source movement. He wishes people would stop lumping the FSF's work in with that of the open source movement.

Upon reading the front page quote from Dvorak, the first thing I wanted to do is put my fist through the 19in CRT.

I couldn't believe John Dvorak would say something like this. Upon reading his article/rant/blithering-ichor, I've come to the realizaion that JD never bothered to read any of the CC licences. Then I started to laugh.

As a filmmaker, I wouldn't even be able to LEGALLY and freely distribute my productions on the web. As the copyright owner, I control the licence with CC. Personally, I've chosen the by-nc-nd licence to allow for free, unlimited personal use. Commercial uses are stricly controlled. You have the freedom with CC to create virtually any kind of licence you want for any type of original work.

Why is this harmful, JD? Why isn't empowering copyright owners with freedoms to "give" their work away threaten you?

We're all being creative, we want credit, fame and fortune for our efforts. We all object strongly to someone else taking the credit, without having done any work of their own to add to it.

The copyright system is a crude tradeoff to try to reward creative effort. It works, somewhat, but we want a better set of tools.

The GPL, BSD license, CC, and numerous other license are all the result of efforts to provide a those tools. They all involve tradeoffs, but are positive on the whole.

What Mr Dvorak had the audacity to state publicly, is that the "NonCommerical" licenses which seem to be popular, might not be a good idea in the long run.

I don't have $34BN revenue stream like M$, but I find myself in the same exact spot as them when someone chooses to use the NoCC options. I might take their cool picture, and use it along with others, and add years worth of work to get it all perfect... but if I decide to sell the result for a buck, I just violated the license. There needs to be a better middle ground.

Commercial/NonCommercial is an artificial distiction that should be considered harmful. It's interesting to note that the Creative Commons website itself, uses the CC:BY license, which DOES allow commercial derivatives.

--Mike--

The actual legalease of the Attribution CC license actually specifies the mimimum requirements for attribution.
To summarize, you have to name the author and title (if any), and if applicable, the URI and the license. If it's a derivative work, reference what it's a derivative of. Attribution should be with any other credits, and should be as prominant. The attribution should also be represented in a manner appropriate to the medium. In other words, the HTML source would not be a reasonable place to stick the attribution for an image. It would, however, probably be appropriate for some CC javascript code.

The legalease for Attribution-No Commercial-Share Alike can be found at here, with the attribution clause being 4.d. I would assume that the other Attribution licenses would be similar. I am not, of course, a lawyer.

It's already in there: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/fullrigh ts. So he's wrong about that, too.

I think it's fair to say that he's just a moron who doesn't take the time to perform even the most basic research.

quoth the OP:

the CC licenses should have a (purely informational) clause noting that "none of these limitations should be construed as eliminating any Fair Use rights granted by U.S. copyright law."

They do. Look it up before you make incorrect assumptions.

saith e.g. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5:

Fair Use Rights. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use, first sale or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws.

The one tiny good point Dvorak makes here is that the CC licenses should have a (purely informational) clause noting that "none of these limitations should be construed as eliminating any Fair Use rights granted by U.S. copyright law." That's a clarification to the license that is at least worth discussing.

Maybe something along the lines of "Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above."? Oh wait, that's *already* in bold on the human-readable Summary page

Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

That really says it all, doesn't it ? I can't figure out what the purpose of this website is, so it must be a dumb website. I can't figure out how to use this Linux operating system, so it must suck. These metric units of measure don't seem familiar to me, using them is dumb.

What a pompous ass.

I'm not that curious and I don't care that much, but even to the complete idiot, it should be blindingly obvious that Creative Commons is a clearing house website of sorts. It's there as an attempt to shore up freedom of use. Of course, it's NOT 'necessary', it doesn't change copyright law or even do anything revolutionary... *except* that it is a place where you can go to find things which you can use. It's an aggregator, sort of, like a limited Google or whatever, so right there it's useful. If I want, i can search out some public-domain stuff there, and I'll *know* it's public-domain and can use it as such. Or, if I'm not repackaging and selling content, I can find something there with a different license that allows commercial-free use, and use that, and know it's OK to do so, without fear of being sued or the hassle of contacting the creator for their permission.

And of course, I still have fair use at my disposal. The Creative Commons license doesn't ( and, as Dvorak points out ) can't limit that.

I haven't researched Creative Commons to pick up what I just wrote... but I think it's vaguely correct, and if I can figure that out, why is John so dumb?

If you answered because he's a part of why we've grown to dislike those in the media, because he is as usual just trolling to get hits on his website, you are right. At least, I hope so. It'd be sad if this guy is really so stupid.

If his questions about Creative Commons aren't answered in the "about" section of their website I'd be really shocked.

The book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.

Without the licence I couldn't give my friends copies of the book. With this licence I can, as long as I don't get paid for it, don't change it, and attribute the author.

aye!

This post is covered by it's creative commons license:



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

-->

aye!

This post is covered by it's creative commons license:



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

-->

to quote from his "column" (used in a very loose sense of the word):
There are several things that bother me about this initiative. First, Creative Commons is similar to a license. You sign up with the group and post a message saying that your material is protected or covered by Creative Commons. This means that others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes. Why not commercial purposes? What difference does it make, if everyone is free and easy about this? In other words, a noncommercial site could distribute a million copies of something and that's okay, but a small commercial site cannot deliver two copies if it's for commercial purposes. What is this telling me?

What it's telling you, John, is that you're a dumbfuck who hasn't figured out that the CC license is a MODULAR license.

The basic CC license is, essentially, "public domain" -- there are no restrictions on your reproduction of the material. CC then offers legally defined exceptions. With all of the CC terms in place, you have essentially the full standard U.S. copyright restrictions.

What CC does is it gives you a legally well-formed copyright system that lets you protect your work, yet lets it be redistributed somewhat more freely than typical material, but not-quite public domain free.

it just so happens that one of those optional restrictions is "no commercial distribution". I'd like to point out that this does not in any way trump "fair use", something that Dvorak would know if he had the IQ of a pet rock.

as to why I use CC: I want to allow my works (should I actually get around to putting some content on my website... any day now, folks... ;) to be distributed, and I want to encourage their distribution -- however, I want them to be protected. Namely, I want credit for what I do, and I want more people to release their work freely. So I have a "By, Share Alike" License -- Commercial derivations are perfectly ok.

Can we please not have any more Dvorak on /.? He's just so mind-bogglingly stupid, he makes me feel physically ill. Seriously.

That's why the Creative Commons was conceived. Check it out here

In short, this film does not have an expired copyright; archive.org has obtained a general waiver of enforcement (and if they are lucky, they've obtained it from the true copyright holder).

Ask a question about a crazy legal regime...

BUT archive.org does allow copyright holders to make a dedication to the public by a creative commons license. After archive.org recovers, check the details, and if there is a "creative commons license" link, click on it.

I had no idea it existed, but this Cory fellow is apparently releasing his books under the Creative Commons Developing Nations License.
In essence, it says that you can not only download the work, but you can also make money on it - as long as you live in a developing country, and do not make any money on it in a High-Income country.

Way cool.

...Am I legally allowed to print it? If I'm allowed to distribute the free e-book (and I don't know if I am), couldn't I print many of them, and give them to people at Barnes & Noble? There are some borderlines there, and I'm quite interested in figuring it all out.

I figured this was a simple case of RTFA... until I read Cory's license! The license is a new CC license, Developing Nations 2.0. IF you live in a developing nation (using a UN definition) you can:

• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to make derivative works

...Am I legally allowed to print it? If I'm allowed to distribute the free e-book (and I don't know if I am), couldn't I print many of them, and give them to people at Barnes & Noble? There are some borderlines there, and I'm quite interested in figuring it all out.

I figured this was a simple case of RTFA... until I read Cory's license! The license is a new CC license, Developing Nations 2.0. IF you live in a developing nation (using a UN definition) you can:

• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to make derivative works

Yes, you can print them.

Both Doctorow's and Stross's work are released under the Creative Commons license. They are explained here. There are several variants, but they only differ in what you can or cannot do to redistribute the work. As far as what you do in the privacy of your own home, they are all the same: they say that you can do whatever you want with the work. And, yes, that includes printing. It's also OK for others to print it for you, even if they charge you for the privilege.

Yes, you can print them.

Both Doctorow's and Stross's work are released under the Creative Commons license. They are explained here. There are several variants, but they only differ in what you can or cannot do to redistribute the work. As far as what you do in the privacy of your own home, they are all the same: they say that you can do whatever you want with the work. And, yes, that includes printing. It's also OK for others to print it for you, even if they charge you for the privilege.

Apparently all free music really is illegal these days.

Excuse me?

I like the GPL because it's a copyleft. If you take my work and modify it, that's fine, but you can't turn around and tell me I can't copy or distribute your modified version.

On the other hand, I think the BSD license is advantageous because it doesn't have the requirement to release source code. In this sense, I feel the BSD license is more free.

I've created my own license, the QingPL, which I consider the perfect license. Basically, you can do anything you want with the code without any restrictions, as long as you don't sue anyone for copyright infringement over it or a derivative of it. About a year after I created this license Creative Commons released ShareAlike 1.0, which is essentially the same thing which a bunch of extra legalese thrown in.

Unfortunately Creative Commons decided to drop ShareAlike from its 2.0 series of licenses. The next best alternative is Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. That one adds the requirement to attribute the author(s) of the work, which is fine if you're talking about one or two people, but can get to be a pain in the ass if you're talking about 5000 people.

Sometimes I use the QingPL for the works I create (for instance my Slashdot posts are licensed under the QingPL). But lately I've just been using ShareAlike 1.0, as that has a bit more credibility. For works that are already created I'm willing to use just about any Free license, at least until a more Free license can be found.

I like the GPL because it's a copyleft. If you take my work and modify it, that's fine, but you can't turn around and tell me I can't copy or distribute your modified version.

On the other hand, I think the BSD license is advantageous because it doesn't have the requirement to release source code. In this sense, I feel the BSD license is more free.

I've created my own license, the QingPL, which I consider the perfect license. Basically, you can do anything you want with the code without any restrictions, as long as you don't sue anyone for copyright infringement over it or a derivative of it. About a year after I created this license Creative Commons released ShareAlike 1.0, which is essentially the same thing which a bunch of extra legalese thrown in.

Unfortunately Creative Commons decided to drop ShareAlike from its 2.0 series of licenses. The next best alternative is Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. That one adds the requirement to attribute the author(s) of the work, which is fine if you're talking about one or two people, but can get to be a pain in the ass if you're talking about 5000 people.

Sometimes I use the QingPL for the works I create (for instance my Slashdot posts are licensed under the QingPL). But lately I've just been using ShareAlike 1.0, as that has a bit more credibility. For works that are already created I'm willing to use just about any Free license, at least until a more Free license can be found.

They at least deserved mention in TFA.

But regarding the specific GPL-vs-BSD troll; I must say I prefer GPL; because every GPL'd project I worked on at previous employers, I can still find that code out there if I ever need it again. With the BSD'd stuff I saw at a previous employer, there's no way for me to get the same version I had used there.

They at least deserved mention in TFA.

But regarding the specific GPL-vs-BSD troll; I must say I prefer GPL; because every GPL'd project I worked on at previous employers, I can still find that code out there if I ever need it again. With the BSD'd stuff I saw at a previous employer, there's no way for me to get the same version I had used there.

This reminds me of some speculation on the rate of innovation in reaction to the attention Neil Gershenfeld's Fab Labs have been getting.

Fab Labs are USD$20,000 boxes of equipment that can be used, with an afternoon of training, to cook up many inventions, including basic electronics. This is the beginning of something that eventually might resemble a desktop nanofactory like this one proposed by Chris Phoenix of The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

In short, the premise (open for debate, at present) is that personal fabricators ("PFs") in every home could do for patents what personal computers (PCs) in every home have done for copyright, when combined with the Internet. If the tools to innovate material things were distributed to non-commerical users, the amount of non-commercial innovation increases, whether we're talking about software or gizmos. For twenty years, incumbent comemrcial patents might dominate, but once they expire, openly-licensed patents could dominate through sheer numbers.

The popularity of open source licensing has largely solved the copyright problem; there are plentiful alternatives for those who insist on software freedom, and more are arriving daily. PFs could extend this to physical inventions, as well.

Huebner's choice of "major innovations" and patents as his measures of innovation just prove his bias is slanted toward the fact that innovation is decreasing because it's concentrating along with the wealth that results from it.

The main reason for all of this: supply of classical musicians vastly exceeds demand. On the supply side, music schools, universities and conservatories worldwide are graduating thousands of performers of classical music every year. On the demand side, you can count the number of classical music professional orchestras in most countries in the low single digits; the reality is that the market for classical music concerts is much smaller than the market for popular music concerts.

However, what this means for the future of open-licensed freely downloadable recordings of classical music is less clear. There is no shortage of brilliant musicians already employed full-time in other paying jobs like music teaching who might consider getting together with others to perform classical works under some sort of open licence, like one of the Creative Commons licences . I suspect that as more people become aware of the open-licensing phenomenon in other media, more classical music performers will help create a similar bandwagon for classical music recordings.

For some products (medications, movies, games, music), the cost of the first copy is extremely large relative what any individual would be willing to pay.

Then don't publish the work until you have enough preorders. To promote your product, publish freebies. Then amortize the cost of the first copy of the work across all preorders. Besides, you can make money on value-added, hard-to-copy attributes such as good paper in a good binding. Cory Doctorow has taken this approach with his works.

Would those that illegally distribute first-run movies or games be willing to wait 14 years or any number of years to allow content creators to make enough money to pay for the cost of the first copy?

If a work's copyright lasts 14 years, after which the work is available for others to create and publish derivatives, you'll see at least a few warez kiddies rejoining the light side, taking classic films and classic music and releasing their own reinterpretations on the net.

For some products (medications, movies, games, music), the cost of the first copy is extremely large relative what any individual would be willing to pay.

Then don't publish the work until you have enough preorders. To promote your product, publish freebies. Then amortize the cost of the first copy of the work across all preorders. Besides, you can make money on value-added, hard-to-copy attributes such as good paper in a good binding. Cory Doctorow has taken this approach with his works.

Would those that illegally distribute first-run movies or games be willing to wait 14 years or any number of years to allow content creators to make enough money to pay for the cost of the first copy?

If a work's copyright lasts 14 years, after which the work is available for others to create and publish derivatives, you'll see at least a few warez kiddies rejoining the light side, taking classic films and classic music and releasing their own reinterpretations on the net.

I was trying to get at the point that something more like the Creative Commons licenses for code would work well.

Oh, indeed. In fact, this one is already extremely popular and used by a number of very successful free/open-source software projects. ;)

I think I wrote my post in a ambiguous, confusing manner.. oops! I apologise for that.

I was trying to get at the point that something more like the Creative Commons licenses for code would work well. The Creative Commons licenses let individual content creators add and remove certain provisos to the core license, whereas the GPL is rather concrete, and many people do not understand what it actually states. CC licenses, on the other hand, are very simple and flexible.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this new Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as difficult as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the physical location of the offending server. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Homeland Security Department. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives recipes or the formulas for nerve gases.) The supercomputers that constantly monitor the cameras mounted on every lampost in the United States of (God Bless It!) America will be ordered to recognize the criminals' faces, and when they are spotted trying to flee to the Amazon jungle, orbiting lasers will vaporize their bodies, leaving nary but a whisp of smoke.

When a close family friend tries to comfort one of the grieving mothers for the loss of her son, she will desperately proclaim "No, I have no children! You must have mistaken me for someone else. Please leave me alone!" before she scurries rapidly away.

National firewalls such as those employed by The People's Republic of China are expensive and difficult to maintain. They are notoriously leaky, and easy to circumvent by anyone determined enough to find out how. But worse, they impede the economic potential of emerging economies such as China, which necessarily bottleneck technical data and eCommerce in order to have a single chokepoint for the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and Pornography).

Imagine, if you will, the potential of our New Internet: not only by technical design, but by international treaty (enforced by the threat of military intervention on the part of the UN Security Council), each nation will have a national firewall which is as transparent to the air to fully-licensed Windows Media Video files of Barney the Dinosaur and paid-up Wal-Mart orders, yet absolutely impenetrable to content not sanctioned by Homeland Security, the Republican Party, the 700 Club and the Boy Scouts.

I, for one, am weary of our present Internet, cesspool that it is of moral depravity and copyright infringement. I long for the days of yore, when men were men, women wore hoopskirts, and racial minorities were separate but equal. And so, I raise my right hand and shout with an enthusiastic "Heil!":

I welcome my new Internet overlords!

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

ok, guess I just learned to make sure I have *text* selected...

here it is as I actually typed it:

Jeremy Wright just posted a comment over at

http://www.digital-web.com/news/2005/06/microsoft_ to_take_rss_five_steps_backwards/#comment1361

and pointed out the fact that the stuff MS is doing it actually fairly syndication agnostic. (Read: 'not just rss') They HAD to extend RSS to get the functionality they wanted that already exists the ATOM spec.

So if you are worried that they will some how *screw you* if you try to use their extensions, just use ATOM and the functionality is already there.

BTW I think the fact that their extension is being released under the same CC license as the RSS2.0 spec should earn them a little credit, but then again this is /. so I don't expect the 'regulars' to even notice.

Here is the CC info that bother the original RSS2.0 spec and the MS extensions have been released under:
"Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Jorgie

Microsoft's copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). To view a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/. As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification's extensions. If Microsoft later becomes aware of any such necessary patent claims, Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification.

Jeremy Wright just posted a comment over at http://www.digital-web.com/news/2005/06/microsoft_ to_take_rss_five_steps_backwards/#comment1361 and pointed out the fact that the stuff MS is doing it actually fairly syndication agnostic. (Read: 'not just rss') They HAD to extend RSS to get the functionality they wanted that already exists the ATOM spec. So if you are worried that they will some how *screw you* if you try to use their extensions, just use ATOM and the functionality is already there. BTW I think the fact that their extension is being released under the same CC license as the RSS2.0 spec should earn them a little credit, but then again this is /. so I don't expect the 'regulars' to even notice. Here is the CC info that bother the original RSS2.0 spec and the MS extensions have been released under: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ Jorgie

Looks like the RSS 2.0 spec is under Share Alike, actually. Ya learn something new every day...

Now, I'm no MS apologist (look back at my comments) but this is actually good news because Microsoft has decided to release the specs under a Creative Commons "Attribution, Share-Alike" liscense: one of the more generous liscensing plans released by the Creative Commons.

Larry Lesig has more at his blog.

I can't vouch for Microsoft's reasons for doing this, other than speculate that they are trying to respond to the old criticism that "embrace and extend" really means "steal and lock away". If Microsoft really is trying to be more open in it's communiction protocols, I can't help but see that as a good thing. They are free to extend all they want as long as they do not use their dominant market position to force those extensions on their customers to unfairly place burdens on their competitors.

So? That doesn't mean they will make extensions that are 100% compatible with non-MS products.

Their extensions will be released under the Creative Commons License

There are 6 licenses to choose from, which one is MS using?

And where exactly are you getting your facts? There's no mention of CC in the linked article and it's not like Creative Commons is actually a software license, anyway...

Because selling it gets the author some money.

And selling paper copies while distributing it online under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 doesn't? Try telling that to Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Some people will pay a premium for a professionally bound paper copy.

In the meantime, consider producing works under licenses such as the GPL, the GNU Free Documentation License, the Free Art License, or a Creative Commons license with a "share-alike" provision. This is not perfect, but this would use copyright restrictions for preserving freedom. Those wanting to produce works under permissive licenses would have an advantage denied to the producers of proprietary-licensed works.

It is also worth considering the role of money in politics.