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If a freely licensed version on Wikipedia exists, then many publishers would simply take the wikipedia photo.

The standard license on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA. It's my understanding (as a non-lawyer) that if you upload an image to Wikipedia also as ShareAlike, then anyone who uses your image is bound by the creative commons license (or a compatible alternative) for any derivative works (similar in spirit to the GPL).

This would automatically rule out many uses that photographers might want restricted; major publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers will not be interested in licensing the derivative work under a creative commons license. As the original copyright owner, the photographer will be able to dual-license the photo on a case by case basis. That means that you can upload your photo to Wikipedia for use with CC-licensed works, while getting exposure of your work from potential commercial buyers. Just make sure that when you upload to WP you use CC-BY-SA, and not one of the less restrictive licenses. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I submitted several of the great shots of Travis Tritt I took last year when I was on stage with him as photographer for one event, with a release terms they requested and they said no thank you.

Could you please elaborate? Who said no thank you? What were the details of the offer and refusal? I expect there was a misunderstanding, because what you describe doesn't make any sense. Why would Wikipedia refuse a high quality, relevant, useful image? You don't need to seek permission up front, you can just create a Wikipedia account, select an acceptable license (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, GFDL, or public domain, your choice!), and upload your photo, you should be good to go. Assuming the photo is relevant, add it to an article. (You don't need to add it to an article, but people may not notice your generous contribution if you don't.)

I submitted several of the great shots of Travis Tritt I took last year when I was on stage with him as photographer for one event, with a release terms they requested and they said no thank you.

Could you please elaborate? Who said no thank you? What were the details of the offer and refusal? I expect there was a misunderstanding, because what you describe doesn't make any sense. Why would Wikipedia refuse a high quality, relevant, useful image? You don't need to seek permission up front, you can just create a Wikipedia account, select an acceptable license (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, GFDL, or public domain, your choice!), and upload your photo, you should be good to go. Assuming the photo is relevant, add it to an article. (You don't need to add it to an article, but people may not notice your generous contribution if you don't.)

I should qualify that statement by saying that aggregate works (called "collection" in the license text), such as text with the image separate, may be non-free. Cf. Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

Is there a reason why professors haven't led the way in switching to textbooks published as free cultural works?

Because only profs who already have tenure can afford the luxury of non-traditional publishing mechanisms.

The others have to go with the traditional publishers because that way they get at least a little bit of "research output" credit. Not much, but at least the dean of the faculty won't be immediately firing them for wasting valuable research time.

This isn't likely to change much within the next decade or two, because the people who get to decide which kinds of publication "count" as research output and which ones don't are never academics themselves. Textbooks as free cultural works can't become the norm unless both academics, and the bureaucrats who conduct research output evaluations, are persuaded simultaneously.

Typically, the publisher will stop selling the old edition

In other words, the old "Disney vault" trick. Is there a reason why professors haven't led the way in switching to textbooks published as free cultural works?

at Lessig.org back in 2004, he noted, "I am distrustful of people who think they have confident answers to such questions." That goes for both sides in this debate.

You realize you just quoted him without his consent, right? Lucky you, it's licensed under CCv3... otherwise he should've torched your ass!

I took a copyright law class not too long ago and after said class I came to the conclusion that exclusive copyright even for a short period is theft. If you put exclusive protection to a piece of work then your stealing that idea from the creative pool and preventing its usage by everyone else who may have had that idea. Now what if that one idea was what would have set an individual on the path to being an artist but the person didn't even bother because someone owned it already. What if that person were to become the next Picasso? The next Michel Angelo, Julie Bell, Luis Royo or Olivia De Berardinis? How could anyone let the world be deprived of that? Keep in mind that this comment is from an artist point of view. I write, draw, paint and honestly I want other artist to be able to take my work and put their own twist on it or make it something completely different. With the current copyright laws that's not possible unless you know about the Creative Commons License. http://creativecommons.org/

Is there any License that will prevent transcoding original video produced by me, to another format, like .flv?

Hmmm... is transcoding a "derivative work" ? If so (and I'm not sure one way or the other) then something like CC-By-ND should do the trick.

I'd like to make my videos open source only, including the "container".

Hmm... now if you just want the video to remain in an open format, absent the general Fair Use rules that would allow someone to use short excerpts of your work in a file formatted as "Ultimate Proprietary Format 9000" or whatnot, I wonder if you could GPLv3 the sucker. If the video is available as GPLv3 only, then to quote from that license:

Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.

So if I take your video X in an open file format and then transcode it to another open file format to make a new file Y, then I'm golden. But if I transcode X using H264 to make Z, then the entity 'Z' cannot be used, run, or sold without possible patent infringement claims, so Z is not valid for distribution under your license.

IANAL, and these are just my random mutterings. Be warned!

You can still have music. Check out Jamendo.

A lot of the music is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial Share-Alike, meaning you can make derivative works using the music, but must include a reference to the original author, and only for non-commercial purposes (free to access, no advertisments, no remuneration for works). Make sure to check with the applicable license for that particular artist / track, though (Six license types under CC).

You can still have music. Check out Jamendo.

A lot of the music is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial Share-Alike, meaning you can make derivative works using the music, but must include a reference to the original author, and only for non-commercial purposes (free to access, no advertisments, no remuneration for works). Make sure to check with the applicable license for that particular artist / track, though (Six license types under CC).

But the credit removal requirement in even CC-BY might cause license incompatibility if a free program under a GNU license uses CC-BY images, audio, etc.

As far as I can tell, that was an issue with CC v2 licenses, but it's been fixed in v3:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC-BY#Criticism
• http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7249
• https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#CreativeCommonsShare-Alike.28CC-SA.29v3.0

It might cost more in the future given that software patents exist. If you can prove that prior art exists, you can invalidate a patent. Here is a simple one:

Maze War was one of the first multi-player 3D person shoot-out games, written around 1974 on an IMLACS PSD-1 at NASA Ames Research Center.

Having evidence of this prior art, helped to settle many patent claimes related to multi-player and networked gaming.

Our November 2004 30th birthday event for "Maze War," the first-ever first-person shooter, uncovered so much prior art that Sony contacted us about several patent challenges on multi-player gaming. It turns out that by recovering the history of "Maze War," we had knocked the wind out of several patent claims, which are now headed to settlement instead of to court.

Out of curiosity, does anyone remember UNIX games like Grid, Convoy, Dune and Wander, written by Peter. S. Langston?

"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.

At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.

On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?

Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."

So these laws finally went through, and the pirates are here. Surprise!

Consider voluntarily opting out of the over-zealous protections offered by current copyright law. For example, check out O'Reilly's Open Book project. Among their options are the Founders' Copyright, where works return to the public domain after 14 or 28 years (instead of the current lifetime + 70 years). Even better, given the technological revolution between then and now, consider even less restrictive licenses that would enable your customers to get even greater benefit out of your works.

Yes, this option requires that the public make some "nice distinctions" by recognizing that your works are (would be) more freely available than the typical work, and that they should correspondingly pirate them less. If you take this path, remember to proclaim your moral highground loudly and proudly, so that people notice. Also, encouraging your coworkers, fellow authors, publishers, etc., along the same lines and increasing the number of works so available will help the public to more often encounter and understand this issue, and again reduce the incentive to pirate your works.

AFAIK what he's suggesting is already within the scope of the CC license.

It's been floated before, under the name CCPlus. See also Slashdot's coverage of CCPlus.

Since we're both into Creative Commons licensed mp3s, and in the event that others who may not know are following this thread, in addition to Magnatune, check out http://www.jamendo.com/ - for those interested in Creative Commons and what it mean to their music, see
http://www.jamendo.com/en/creativecommons/
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8518
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/03/jamendo-adds-licensing.html

You're probably looking for something like Pootle. This is used by a number of projects doing localisation including: Creative Commons, OpenOffice.org and others

It allows online translation and management of translation projects. It translates Gettext PO (for software localisation) and XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format), by using standard localisation formats it makes it easy to manage both online and offline translations. The Translate Toolkit can be used to convert various formats into PO or XLIFF for online translation.

I'm not sure exactly what you need to do in the audio, do you want to overdub or use subtitles? If you want subtitles you can use sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert subtitle files to Gettext PO. You'd still need to subtitle the files, then you could put those on Pootle to allow anyone to translate them into their language.

If you have documents in OpenDocument Format (ODF) then you can use the Toolkits odf2xliff converter to allow those to be translated on Pootle.

Pootle allows people to translate online or offline and they can commit their work directly to a version control system from within Pootle. This allows you to automate most of the process for you and your users.

But most people will behave rationally and not buy what they can get for free ... I think the pro-piracy movement should learn more about economics.

I think economists should learn more about human behaviour. A large number of people don't act rationally; the idea of the rational self-interested individual who makes rational purchase decisions based on the information available to them is a myth. It's seductive because most economists are geeks (like us) and that's how most geeks behave and it also makes modelling behaviour much simpler but people out there in the real world do all sorts of crazy things for utterly ludicrous reasons.

If you disagree with that then I'd urge you to download the Adam Curtis documentary series' "The Trap" and "Century of the Self". They were paid for by the BBC and I'm not aware of them being available on DVD so I'd say it's ethical to download them.

The biggest selling MP3 album on Amazon last year was Nine Inch Nails "Ghosts I-IV" which you could download, for free, in better quality, from nin.com [source]. Most people will pay for what they can get free.

The simple fact is that you can't stop piracy. The only sensible business decision you can make when faced with that reality is to target markets where the people are more likely to act as irrationally as NIN fans and, in the case of video-games, you do that by creating great, addictive experiences that people become emotionally attached to.

Don't worry about the pirates, they are irrelevant.

Okay, basic copyrights work like this. Once the author creates the work the automatic copyright that is placed on the work (with out registering it with the copyright office, something you do to help protect yourself from copyright law suites but its not necessary) last for the life of the author plus 75 years. If there is more than one author then the copyright last for the life of all authors, once the lats author has died then its 75 years on top of that. Also if there is more than one author you need the permission of all living authors or the representative that the authors chose in order to use their work. That's why as an artist I'm all for the Creative Commons License. http://creativecommons.org/

Any content that is distributed under any of the Creative Commons NC licenses (e.g. cc-sa-nc cannot legally used for advertising purposes. The very similar license under which the Grateful Dead allow redistribution of their old concert recordings explicitly lists advertising and "exploiting databases compiled from their traffic" as forbidden.

I was wondering if this use is in violation of the Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales license? http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/

How about this for a reason: the reason it's long is that the GFDL is encumbered by a number of clauses and options that are totally inappropriate for Wikipedia or a project like it. Their presence in the license terms can be confusing and off-putting to contributors (who will read things like 'We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software'), and contributes nothing to the project.

Some of those particular options present in the license make GFDL content incompatible with Wikipedia. That means that content that is brought in, even though it is ostensibly under the "right" license, has to be scrutinized to ensure that the particular GFDL options that are used aren't going to present problems down the road. The proposed CC license would have no such possible wrinkles.

The GP poster is correct that the CC license has no ideological preamble that goes into specific ideology; compare the GFDL and the CC license in question. The Wikipedia ethos/ideology and the Gnu Foundation take on things are not identical; therefore, it makes more sense to use a license that is not specifically tied to terms and ideas borrowed from GNU.

Finally, GFDL is a barrier to the incorporation of a lot of good, free material into Wikipedia. CC is a much more common licensing type for non-software related things, like photographs. Getting and keeping good, free images to illustrate articles is a constant struggle on Wikipedia. It is made more difficult by the fact that very few people are posting new images with GFDL licensing, but there are a lot of people (or at least a lot relative to people using GFDL) using a Creative Commons license. A lot of media resources that Wikipedia currently can't use would be made accessible by this change.

She could always get royalty free music.

I don't pirate it either. I just do without. Why? Because I can't bring myself to give my hard earned money to the thieving cocksuckers that comprise the RIAA and contribute to their program of turning the internet into a police state.

Why don't you try to use the internet against the RIAA? You can legally download music from a number of websites. Some of them are:

• Creative Commons
• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
• Magnatune
• Podsafe music network
• 7digital

Now you may not find music you like but you might.

Falcon

Then again, I have considered issuing my tunes as open source (there's some places to do that online.)

Yeah, there are a bunch of "free music" sites. Also if you haven't heard about it yet, check out Creative Commons. They do open-source-like licenses for media and have taken care of all the hard work, you just pick the variant that works best for you and post your content somewhere.

CC0 is not intended for software. If you want copyleft for non-software, CC BY-SA is probably what you want. If you're against copyright there's something to be said for actually renouncing your own (which CC0 tries to do to the maximum extent possible), but I understand the appeal of using copyright against itself, and copyleft certainly has a big role to play.

Maybe technically the way to do this is through a portal, a CC site or a search engine which only returns free-for-all content. But the non-free content needs to be kept out of the results so it doesn't get in the way.

This is precisely why CC has put such effort into making licenses and licensed works machine readable, ie, with metadata that enables such search that only gives you results with the freedoms you request.

Implementations are far from perfect, but you can go to the advanced search pages at Google, Yahoo, Flickr, and elsewhere -- some available via http://search.creativecommons.org/ -- and say that you want results that can be used commercially and for derivatives. That's a start toward what you want, and one has to start somewhere.

"This post is not covered under any license." .. meaningless in the US. especially given the text that follows.

"You are free to copy it, edit it, distribute it, delete it, mod it up, mod it down, etc." .. this is the license.

I always have the right to edit it, it's a copyright not a prevent-people-editing-it-right. But can I redistribute a modified version with your license, I doubt it? It was nice that I am allowed to distribute/copy, which implies the unmodified version. (I think that's how it works)

If I extend it with my own copyright material, with a license that is more restrictive (like sell a book of slashdot posts) then it appears I can do that with the license you have given me. so thanks!

(this post released under CC0 license)

If the people who did care about the damage being done by copyright (eg Stallman) waited for a revolution instead of acting, indeed, FLOSS as we know it wouldn't exist. Linus would've written code, as would've many others, but there would have been no structure for them to successfully collaborate in. It would have been an instance of failed sharing, even if they weren't conscious of it.

We soft launched CC0 recently, and will be doing a hard launch in a couple weeks. If you want to know more, I urge you to check out http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

Here's a copy of the page for easy reading. Please mod this up. :-)

About CC0 -- "No RightsReserved"

This tool is at 1.0 and is ready for adoption. If you would like to participate in a formal announcement, please contact legal@creativecommons.org.

CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright.

In contrast to CC's licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether - the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators - the "no rights reserved" alternative to our licenses.

The Problem

Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright term expires. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about contributing a work to the public domain.

A Solution

CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not ported to any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses. And while this means that CC0 may not be completely effective at relinquishing all copyright interests in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright systems around the world.

Using CC0

Unlike the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, CC0 should not be used to mark works already in the public domain. However, it can be used to waive copyright or database rights to the extent you may have these rights in your work. In addition, you should only apply CC0 to a work if you own all relevant copyright or database rights in it, or have the necessary rights to apply CC0 to another person's work.

• Learn more about CC0
• Choose CC0

We soft launched CC0 recently, and will be doing a hard launch in a couple weeks. If you want to know more, I urge you to check out http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

Here's a copy of the page for easy reading. Please mod this up. :-)

About CC0 -- "No RightsReserved"

This tool is at 1.0 and is ready for adoption. If you would like to participate in a formal announcement, please contact legal@creativecommons.org.

CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright.

In contrast to CC's licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether - the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators - the "no rights reserved" alternative to our licenses.

The Problem

Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright term expires. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about contributing a work to the public domain.

A Solution

CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not ported to any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses. And while this means that CC0 may not be completely effective at relinquishing all copyright interests in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright systems around the world.

Using CC0

Unlike the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, CC0 should not be used to mark works already in the public domain. However, it can be used to waive copyright or database rights to the extent you may have these rights in your work. In addition, you should only apply CC0 to a work if you own all relevant copyright or database rights in it, or have the necessary rights to apply CC0 to another person's work.

• Learn more about CC0
• Choose CC0

We soft launched CC0 recently, and will be doing a hard launch in a couple weeks. If you want to know more, I urge you to check out http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

Here's a copy of the page for easy reading. Please mod this up. :-)

About CC0 -- "No RightsReserved"

This tool is at 1.0 and is ready for adoption. If you would like to participate in a formal announcement, please contact legal@creativecommons.org.

CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright.

In contrast to CC's licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether - the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators - the "no rights reserved" alternative to our licenses.

The Problem

Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright term expires. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about contributing a work to the public domain.

A Solution

CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not ported to any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses. And while this means that CC0 may not be completely effective at relinquishing all copyright interests in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright systems around the world.

Using CC0

Unlike the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, CC0 should not be used to mark works already in the public domain. However, it can be used to waive copyright or database rights to the extent you may have these rights in your work. In addition, you should only apply CC0 to a work if you own all relevant copyright or database rights in it, or have the necessary rights to apply CC0 to another person's work.

• Learn more about CC0
• Choose CC0

We soft launched CC0 recently, and will be doing a hard launch in a couple weeks. If you want to know more, I urge you to check out http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

Here's a copy of the page for easy reading. Please mod this up. :-)

About CC0 -- "No RightsReserved"

This tool is at 1.0 and is ready for adoption. If you would like to participate in a formal announcement, please contact legal@creativecommons.org.

CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright.

In contrast to CC's licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether - the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators - the "no rights reserved" alternative to our licenses.

The Problem

Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright term expires. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about contributing a work to the public domain.

A Solution

CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not ported to any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses. And while this means that CC0 may not be completely effective at relinquishing all copyright interests in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright systems around the world.

Using CC0

Unlike the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, CC0 should not be used to mark works already in the public domain. However, it can be used to waive copyright or database rights to the extent you may have these rights in your work. In addition, you should only apply CC0 to a work if you own all relevant copyright or database rights in it, or have the necessary rights to apply CC0 to another person's work.

• Learn more about CC0
• Choose CC0

You can http://creativecommons.org/policies just don't call it a "Creative Commons license"

this: http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright

You shouldn't use CC licenses for software. There are plenty of good licenses for that purpose -- too many. Use Apache2 or *GPL3. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F

The BSD license is basically, "you may use this for any purpose, as long as you retain this copyright notice". There's also an implicit, "and as long as no other law prevents you from doing so". That's roughly equivalent to most uses of the Creative Commons Attribution license ("cc-by") (cc-by users can require that you "attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor", which could lead to more onerous requirements, but most don't).

This license removes even the attribution requirement, and attempts to waive all of those other implicit rights, such as moral rights in some countries. It's basically an attempt to come as close as possible to: you really can use this for anything you want, absolutely no strings attached, I really mean it.

For software licensing the difference is somewhat smaller, because non-copyright restrictions like moral rights are applied fairly infrequently to software--- they're more often applied to things like artistic works. I'm guessing that's why BSD-licensed software has never worried about it much.

You can indeed apply CC licenses to software, though I would probably only do so with the non-restrictive ones, like this one or cc-by. If you want to apply a copyleft license to software, using something like the GPL or LGPL is probably better than the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike ("cc-by-sa"), because it makes more effort to define exactly what the viral nature does and doesn't do, while cc-by-sa leaves a bunch of stuff vague when it comes to thinks like linking.

NOT.

Creative commons has an interesting problem. How do you allow translation of an open work, without allowing someone to undermine the original text through dubious translation? In other words allow other language translations, but not "modify." It looks like there is a project to set up a consensus on translation. A system by which translations would be performed by the same process from work to work.

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Translate

So I wonder, isn't an automatically generated audio reading, just another translation? Is spoken language to text or vise versa a translation, or is it literally the same text? How about other languages? Dialects?

If all translations are really just a complex substitution problem that can be performed by the reader, does it benefit society to pay for services they didn't receive for a product they already paid for?

As an independent artist I was considering joining your service until I read this (from the lastfm.com Terms of Use):

When you upload Your Upload Information via the Website, you irrevocably grant to Last.fm, its parent, subsidiaries, affiliates, and partners, without any credit or compensation to you, a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, unrestricted, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully transferable, assignable and sub-licensable right and licence to use, reuse, modify, adapt, alter, display, archive, publish, sub-license, perform, copy, reproduce, disclose, transmit, communicate to the public, post, sell, translate, create derivative works of, distribute, make and export Your Upload Information (in whole or in part), or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, software or technology of any kind now known or developed in the future, for any purposes whatsoever including, without limitation, for advertising, marketing, publicity and promotional purposes, such as developing, manufacturing and marketing products and targeted advertisements using such Uploaded Information. You hereby waive any moral rights (or any similar rights in any jurisdiction) you may have in and to any of Your Upload Information, even if such material is altered or changed in a manner not agreeable to you.

It is a truly sad day when an artist forfeits the rights to their art with no compensation or guarantee of credit whatsoever. As your service relies on the creations of others, I recommend a Creative Commons license. Respect the artist and they will respect you.

However much M$, Disney, RIAA, MPAA would like your to believe otherwise, the fact is that copying copyrighted material is perfectly legal in all Berne Convention countries, unless the copyright owner says otherwise. Even perfectly then it may be allowed but with restrictions.

The GPL, ISC, and CC licenses come to mind as overwhelmingly common examples. Act on the empirical facts not opinions, half-baked or otherwise.

What you are describing is in the same vein as the Creative Commons Founders' Copyright, although I am not sure that there is a workable way to also offer the work under a permissive license until the conversion to public domain. Alternately, you could simply wait 14 years (or what have you) and then declare your work to be in the public domain. CC can help you with that too. Of course, all of this assumes that they will still exist in 14 or however many years.

Creative COMMONS deprecated its two almost never used licenses which did not permit at least global noncommercial verbatim distribution, see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7520

Incompatible licenses within the CC suite is of course a valid criticism. For those who get the requirements of the OSD/free software, the solution is to stick to using CC-BY and CC-BY-SA, which CC calls out with approved for free cultural works branding.

Disclaimer: I currently work for CC.

Creative COMMONS deprecated its two almost never used licenses which did not permit at least global noncommercial verbatim distribution, see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7520

Incompatible licenses within the CC suite is of course a valid criticism. For those who get the requirements of the OSD/free software, the solution is to stick to using CC-BY and CC-BY-SA, which CC calls out with approved for free cultural works branding.

Disclaimer: I currently work for CC.

In addition to software licenses, we have licenses like GFDL and CC-BY-SA, which are intended for books, software manuals, etc. That whole situation is a total botch. The GFDL (without any of the added options like invariant sections, etc.) is essentially philosophically and legally equivalent to CC-BY-SA. The fact that we have two licenses for a single purpose is not a good thing. For instance, I've written some physics textbooks that are copylefted. Sometimes I've taken diagrams and photos I did for the books and added them to WP articles. Other times I've taken photos from WP and put them in my books. What makes this all unnecessarily difficult is that although WP uses GFDL (for historical reasons, because CC postdates WP), various other people use CC-BY-SA. We all want to share, but the licensing creates problems. I've ended up dual-licensing my books for this reason, and as far as I can tell, this allows me to bring in either CC-BY-SA or GFDL materials. On the other hand, if other people want to use a photo from my book, they have to look in the photo credits section at the back, and they may find that it's a photo I got from someone else under GFDL, but their project is CC-BY-SA, so they can't use it. They might be able to switch their own project to a similar dual-license scheme to get around this, but that might not be possible; e.g., look at the Linux kernel, which could never change licenses even if Linus wanted it to, because there are too many copyright holders.

One thing I would suggest to anyone uploading pictures to WP or Wikimedia Commons is that you use their recommended licensing option, which is now dual GFDL/CC-BY-SA.

Another real problem in this area is the tendency of people to pick CC-BY-NC, with a noncommercial clause. I see tons of people doing this even for materials that have zero commercial value. For example, there's an innovative physics textbook from the 1970's that went out of print. Cool book, but it was just a little too controversial; the big sellers tend to be the plain vanilla ones that can make everyone in a university department happy enough to sign off on adopting it. It's been out of print for 30 years, and the rights reverted to the author. He scanned it and put it up on his web site as a PDF. I contacted him, told him how much I liked the book, and suggested that he put it under a CC license, because, e.g., otherwise it would have to disappear from the world on the day he got tired of paying a webhosting bill. He decided to do that, which is cool, but he picked CC-BY-NC, which means the book can never be used as the basis for further collaborative work. I think people have this emotional feeling that they don't want to risk having their work exploited commercially by someone else, because that would be a ripoff. The problem is that they don't seem to do a good job of realistically assessing the chances that that would happen. Although the guy I'm referring to is a published author, there are many other people who just don't have a realistic idea of what it's like to try to make a significant amount of money by writing. There are just too many people out there who think they have the next bestseller on their hands.

James Boyle discusses this a fair bit in "The Public Domain, enclosing the commons of the mind" http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11063.

The thing is that this new internet will not be the enternet or anything like it. It will be a controlled place where you go to consume information produced with the aim of being sold.

It is something which gets trialed in various guises again and again. So far it has failed every time. Here In Australia there was a Mob called Free online which offered (dialup at the time) at no charge,providing you remained in their specailly constructed little world. If you left to look at the real internet, well that was billable.

Technical reasons certainly won't make this happen (I mean look at the failure to get anyone to move to ip6) However political will might very well do so, and that will be a dark day for a lot of free speech.

Free expression will be relegated to some prescribed sets of areas with stringent controls around the margins. Copyright will be enforced so ridgedly that even fair use will become impossible. Any criticism of the new order will be removed without notice and the critics, if they persist, will have their access terminated.

The last point already happens on a smaller scale. (Even Wikipeida has barred some people from editing articles). The new internet would make it a condition of use.

We can only hope that the next attempt to produce this networked shopping center will also be a dismal failure which financially ruins its backers.

You mean a bit more like the Creative Commons site does for things like the GPL, LGPL and others? Yeah, that'd be extremely useful. While it's not so legally strict, it means you can actually understand what people can and can't do, which is more than a legal document does for most people!

You mean a bit more like the Creative Commons site does for things like the GPL, LGPL and others? Yeah, that'd be extremely useful. While it's not so legally strict, it means you can actually understand what people can and can't do, which is more than a legal document does for most people!

Summary of all Creative Commons licenses:
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode

4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:
b. You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

and section 3 is:

3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:
c. to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and,
d. to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.

See that "Publicly Perform" bit? You may not do that for commercial advantage.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode

4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:
b. You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

and section 3 is:

3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:
c. to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and,
d. to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.

See that "Publicly Perform" bit? You may not do that for commercial advantage.