Creative Commons Launches Today

Luke Francl writes "On December 16, the Creative Commons is unveiling their commons licenses. Well, their website is up a little early Creative Commons provides an easy way for creators to give away some of their rights under copyright law without wading through hundreds of pages debating the merits of the GPL verus the OPL versus the FDL verus the public domain ad infinitum. By answering three simple questions, the Creative Commons web application selects an appropriate license for you. You can give it a try at the Choose a License page. They've also got a list of all the Creative Commons licenses." Peter Wayner has released his book Free For All under the license.

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Interesting

[jimmyCarter]

It's interesting -- definitely a way to simplify the daunting task of picking a license. I recently began to roll my first SourceForge project and can tell you the license-selection step is very intimidating.

Then again, I don't have the GPL stitched on my pillowcase like some of you. ;)

Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

All well and good, but what does the FSF think of all this? Their opinion matters rather more to me than some "Creative Commons" upstart.

I would also note that depending on the choices you make, you can easily end up with:

(i) a non-Open-Source compatible, non-DFSG-Free license, but one more akin to "source-available proprietary" -"Shared Source" or "Community Source" in Micro$oft/$un newspeak

or

(ii) a license that is Open Source, but not GPL compatible (e.g. recreates the old-style-BSD license, or prohibits commercial, non-proprietary use, which is permitted by the GPL).

This really muddies the waters further, not less, by blurring the distinction between Open and pseudo-open source.

Not really surprising given the O'Reilly involvement - they're known MS-apologists.

Who will use this?

[areThoseMyFeet]

Although this seems like a fine idea in theory, I am having difficulty imagining many situations where people would use it, which would be useful to others.
It is not going to replace copyright for music or books (I realise these aren't mentioned, I'm just trying to think of some possible use - theirs are pretty crap and unlikely) for example - the industry wouldn't touch it for obvious reasons.
If it takes off at all, it would be for the benefit of amateurs only, but then, what's the point?

Re:sharealike = gpl?

[Burdell]

The ShareAlike License looks like it requires that any modifications be distributed under the ShareAlike license (and no other). The GPL only requires that the key provisions of the GPL be followed. If you want to distribute your derivative work under a different (but compatible) license, that is acceptable under the GPL but not under the ShareAlike License. Without reading the fine print, that requirement may actually make the ShareAlike license incompatible with the GPL (as it puts additional restrictions).

Great ideas, but...

[levik]

While these three questions may not cover all the conceivable situations, they probably take into account about 90% of the cases you can run up against (with the notable exception of the "link-only" option)

I wonder however, if people may shy away from this great resource simply because it lacks the exposure and "clout" of the GPL? That would truly be a unfortunate outcome.

What about the rest of the world?

[jb_nizet]

OK, so this web site gives licenses for the US, in english.
Are the licenses applicable outside the US?
If so, wouldn't it be nice to provide the license text in other languages (at least the main ones: French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc.)?

JB.

Re:Slight problem here

[henben]

The (To be specific:...) was added after I submitted the comment! Seriously...

Whoever just updated the site, please confirm this - I fear for my Karma.

Good but not good enough

[Danta]

Still too much legalese for my liking. Just look at their Public Domain declaration. Give me a break.

I think no license is user-friendly if it can't be understood and bothered to be read by a 10-year old. Consider the fact that legally ANYONE SHOULD read and understand the license of every single piece of software they use and the usage agreement of every single website they visit that has one. In present time this is simply impossible.

Public domain

[Ed Avis]

It's good to see that the Creative Commons people are encouraging authors to put works into the public domain, which is the simplest way to make something freely redistributable and the most liberal (as well as not having questions of how to interpret the wording in a particular licence).

Unfortunately, the Open Source Initiative refuse to certify public domain code as Open Source (they did in an earlier version of the Open Source definition, but not now, according to license-approval@opensource.org). So in a way this is another split between the Stallman / Lessig / FSF camp and the Eric Raymond / OSI camp, even though in theory they hold the same set of criteria for deciding what is free.

Potential Recursion Problem

[frostman]

as soon as i saw the story, i went to the site and started on the merry path to licensing out some content (maybe some pictures or something)...

but the license i was most interested in, Attribution + Share Alike, seemed to present a recursion problem.

with software licenses this isn't such a big deal, because a big fat license and attribution file can be included (license.txt) and often is.

but with something like a picture, the attribution and/or copyright notice is not realistically going to be longer than a "normal" URL.

i send them a note about this, which i quote below. hopefully somebody has greater insight into this than i do, because to me it looks like you could end up doing a whole lotta work building your license.html pages on your website (mary in the example below) or you're more or less begging to be plagiarized.

the example:

i take a picture, you (joe) modify it, someone else (mary) modifies that, and it gets printed in a magazine. what's the credit? "foto by frost/joe/mary" or "foto by mary/joe/frost" or....?

this gets really complicated if, say, i provide a bland little picture and joe crops and enlarges it to make it interesting and then mary uses it in a collage that's really beautiful... wherein mary is really the primary author of her piece, and i am the author of the source of a component thereof. and what if mary has used fifty such pieces? soon there is more attribution than she can reasonably expect to print next to pictures of the collage (which she has, after all, been required to license)... do we then have an attribution link?

and in such a case, if all the original elements were licensed through creativecommons, would there be a way, on that website, to show all the attributions within one URL (with licenses)?

if i license something with "Attribution + Share Alike" that itself uses things licensed with "Attribution + Share Alike," i probably need to include those licenses' links and attributions within the creativecommons link to my page... at a very minimum.

It's not all about code

[LetterJ]

A lot of posters seem to be oblivious to the fact that people want to share things other than code. Things like art, literature and music. The GPL, BSD and other software licenses are a shoehorn fit at best and blatantly inappropriate in most cases when applied to these domains of intellectual property. Go read the GPL and see how many of the paragraphs deal exclusively with software terminology. Those licenses deal in terms of "source code", "machine code", etc. That's pretty easy to interpret for software, but what's "source code" in art? In music? Is sheet music the real source or should you be providing a fully instrumented MIDI file to work with as "source"? These new types of licenses are more appropriate for things that aren't software. This isn't a replacement for your precious GPL. It's, instead, an appropriate parallel for non-software instances.

You Woefully Miss the Point

[FreeUser]

Re:Who will use this?

I will, for one, and many others already have.

Although this seems like a fine idea in theory, I am having difficulty imagining many situations where people would use it, which would be useful to others.

There is already a bunch of material licensed under their licenses, and numerous other efforts to achieve similar results under which a great deal of good music and prose is licensed. Clearly there are many others who are having little difficulty in finding these sorts of free licenses useful.

It is not going to replace copyright for music or books (I realise these aren't mentioned, I'm just trying to think of some possible use - theirs are pretty crap and unlikely) for example - the industry wouldn't touch it for obvious reasons.

It isn't "replacing copyright" (though drastic copyright reform eliminating the government monopoly entitlements it grants with a more balanced "sales tax as creator royalty" scheme would be highly desirable), it is creating a license that, similar to the BSD License, the FDL, and the GPL, will facilitate a growing commons of material all creative people can use and build upon.

Finally, who gives a fuck about the "industry" as such. Their purposes are already served, and have been so by a century of corrupt copyright legislation bought and paid for from our inexpensively purchased "representatives" in congress. The cultural squatters of New York, Nashville, and Hollywood, and the cartels they have formed, are the reason that the "vast cultural wasteland" of television and the lack of cultural depth in modern society have become so obvious, and such obvious truisms that they have become cliches.

These free licenses aren't intended to benefit the entrenched "industry" any more than the GPL is designed to Benefit the Sun Microsystems and Microsoft's of the world. It is intended to benefit ARTISTS and CREATIVE PEOPLE, not cultural squatters and an industry that has denigrated the art into a mere product of mass production, filtered down to the lowest common denominator.

If it takes off at all, it would be for the benefit of amateurs only, but then, what's the point?

First this is nonsense. One could have made the same inane (and in retrospect obviously incorrect) argument against the GPL, which has benefitted both amateurs (such as Linus Torvalds when he first began writing the Linux kernel) and professionals (such as IBM).

Likewise, the Creative Commons will empower amateurs (such as myself) and professionals. No, it won't empower Time Warner any more than the GPL empowers Microsoft, but it will empower Indy music and film makers (who are often professionals and not amateurs, though they often serve as a bridge in getting new and talented filmmakers noticed).

Second, every professional was at one time in their career an amateur. A great deal of amateur material is crap, but a great deal is also excellent. Having that material available as part of a commons, free to be distributed, improved upon, and incorporated into other, grander works is a very valuable thing to artists, to society, and to the health of our cultural heritage itself. No, it doesn't benefit Disney and Time-Warner, it benefits the tens of thousands of talented artists Disney, Time-Warner, and others of their ilk have traditionally trampled under their feet, and in addition it benefits the rest of us who enjoy and admire such works.

And that is very, very good thing, tripe and propoganda from the "industry" at its shills and astroturfers notwithstanding.

Re:Don't use, if you want people to use your code

[Hobophile]

The difficulty here lies in your assumption that people would use the Creative Commons licenses for software. They have a FAQ which answers this concern:

Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works. To the extent that we'll deal with types of content that others are already building licenses for -- take the EFF's Open Audio License, for example -- we view that as a good thing. The more ways authors have to get their works out in the public sphere, the better.

Your recommendations may well apply to software, and in all honesty I would probably GPL any software I wrote which I thought had any usefulness at all to others. However, I feel differently about my writing -- I consider it more important and more personal, and though I am willing to post it online for others to read, I have a couple concerns.

Basically I don't want anyone to take credit for something I've written, and I don't want anyone to make a profit off of it if I am not also included in the profiting. I know that I gain these rights automatically whenever I create a work, but it is not entirely clear to the casual visitor/reader what happens to those rights once I've placed something online.

So the Creative Commons licenses provide a fast, headache-free way for me to share my works while also spelling out what my intentions are. For example, I selected the "Attribution, No Derivatives, Non-commercial Use" license for one of my plays.

Any reader curious about what rights have been granted can easily find out, and if a dispute arises, I can point them to a legally sound resource supporting my position.

This particular play was available online previously as a locked down PDF, which was not a solution I was particularly happy with, but which seemed workable at the time. I am much more comfortable with the present license, which incidentally forbides the very digital restrictions I felt the need to impose before.

This is no big loss, in my opinion. My goal is to share, not to police, and the licenses that Creative Commons offers help me achieve that goal in a satisfactory way.