Dvorak on Creative Commons

pHatidic writes "In a recent article, John Dvorak trashes creative commons as being, 'one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes.' His main arguments are that CC unnecessarily complicates copyright law, and that the name sounds dumb."

Comments

At least he's being honest

[Mrs. Grundy]

He says he doesn't get it--and he's right he doesn't. From TFA:

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?

This is telling you that if you want to make money by selling my creative work, then I need a peice of that pie as the creaotr. I don't understand what is so difficult abou this concept

This is nonsense. Before Creative Commons I could always ask to reuse or mirror something.

If my policy is that anyone can reuse, alter and build upon my work for non-commercial purposes isn't easier just so say so--to encourage people--rather than replying to emails? I say everyone here on slashdot should send Dvorak an email asking if they can resuse his work and see how long it takes for him to see the point.

"Creative Commons License: Public domain." This means that the item is not covered by copyright but is in the public domain. So what's Creative Commons got to do with it? Public domain is public domain. It's not something granted by Creative Commons. Yet you see this over and over as if it were!

It is not something granted by creative commons, but it can be something granted by the holder of the copyright and an easy way to communicate this is via public domain statement--kind of like--you guessed is--the one creative commons standardizes.

Re:Creative Commons

[Miros]

To be less obscure, copyrights are automatic and instant whenever you author anything original.

Re:Creative Commons

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from his snark, Dvorak's argument seems to be "what's the big deal, anything I write is already protected and my grandchildren will own it?" He doesn't understand that Creative Commons is a way of *giving up* some rights. But without giving up *all* rights.

With Creative Commons, a content creator can specify clearly that they wish their work to be shared collaboratively, which is the real point of "non-commercial". It's not about peace love and sprouts, it's about getting information quickly into the hands of peers. This intermediate status is an emergent necessity, previously unknown to law.

Summed Up

[paul.dunne]

"John C. Dvorak's modus operandi is to instigate. He is a button-pusher, seldom if ever trying to inform, preferring instead to inflame. And he's pretty good at that. A decade ago, he was the back-page columnist for the now-defunct MacUser magazine; almost every month, the MacUser letters-to-the-editor page contained at least one angry message asking "Why do you publish this guy's column?" The answer, of course, was because it was the sort of column that inspired people to write letters-to-the-editor.

"Dvorak is a pundit, not a reporter. When he makes a prediction, it is usually based on nothing more than his own conjecture, not actual sources. And looking at his track record, his conjecture usually has more to do with what he thinks will be controversial, rather than what might actually happen. (E.g. he's often predicted that Apple was about to go out of business, a prediction which never ceases to get a rise out of the easily incensed.) There's nothing wrong or dishonest about that, but it's something you need to keep in mind with everything he writes. To the best of my knowledge, he's never had a serious scoop regarding Apple -- a significant prediction that turned out to be right -- and he's been on the job for at least two decades."

-- John Gruber

Next!

Re:Creative Commons

[Eric Giguere]

No, it's not a simplified DIY copyright kit. Creative Commons is about simplified licensing of copyrighted works. One of the hardest things about getting permission to use someone else's copyrighted work (and Dvorak's arguments about fair use should be read in light of Ivan Hoffman's fair use article and the realization that "fair use" varies greatly from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction) is actually tracking down the owner of the approriate rights in order to ask them for permission.

Don't believe me? Check out the copyright clearance section of Project Gutenberg. Who has control over which rights is not always clear, nor is it clear how to contact them. A Creative Commons or similar license removes the need (under appropriate conditions) for explicitly obtaining permission from the rights holder.

Now, it's true that the early CC site wasn't very clear as to the purpose and use of the CC licenses. But not anymore.

Eric
Another random blog to look at

Re:Tiny good point among the chaff

[JohnA]

They already include such verbage as seen here.

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

Re:Some uses for novelists, some criticisms

[EggyToast]

He means actual distribution. Fair use covers education, criticism, and parody. It doesn't cover "copying the book to people for promotional purposes, hacking excerpts to show the insides, or creating copies to publish."

What Dvorak misses, and I think what you're also confused by, is that CC does nothing to complicate copyright law. In fact, what CC does is ease the restrictions on copyright.

Under normal copyright law, for someone to take a piece of your work and do something with it, even if it's post it in their blog, is an infringement of copyright. If I were to quote your text on Slashdot here and put it somewhere else, say, in an email to a friend, that's copyright infringement.

Now, most people don't care about it. They don't want their work limited, and they don't want their audience afraid of using their work. However, they also don't want to say "Feel free to copy my stuff!" because what if someone compiles stuff they wrote or created into a book and published it for money? How do they make a distinction that they are waiving copyright for people who just want to copy it and disperse the information for free, vs. those who want to turn a buck?

That's one of the biggest reasons for the CC license. Technically, it expands fair use. It says "Yes, I still have copyright on my work. However, these are the things you can do with it that you wouldn't be able to under an 'All Rights Reserved' copyright statement."

CC is powerful because it informs the audience what they can do with the works they're looking at. In some cases it's text. In others it's pictures, or schematics, recipes, music, whatever. With a music comparison, regular copyright would restrict people from putting it on a P2P network, correct? Under CC, the original author explicitly can state that it's OK to put it on a P2P network, or make copies for friends, or broadcast the work. But that it's not OK to press CDs and sell them to people, or put them on a compilation and sell that, or include it with a radio show that is pay-only.

Looking at that, it's obvious how it does the OPPOSITE of adding complexity to copyright law -- it loosens the copyright of the author in a specific and easy-to-understand way. It points out the copyright of the original author, yet explains what the audience is free to do without repercussions. In this day and age of RIAA lawsuits and C&D letters, I find it exceedingly important to have easy-to-understand-and-use licenses like Creative Commons.

Nope, he doesn't get it...

[rmdir -r *]

From TFA:

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.

The emphasis was mine. Now, check this out from the Creative Commons web site:

Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions.

What conditions? Our site will let you mix and match such conditions from the list of options below. There are a total of eleven Creative Commons licenses to choose from.

Ahem. First: IT IS A LICENSE. Just like the GPL, the MPL, the BSD license and ten thousand others. It.Is.A.License. Which means that I can release my work, explicitly tell people what they can do with it, and under what terms. The CC guys are releasing pre-written licenses that cover common situations, which is a Good Thing(tm) because every dweeb who writes some crappy web novel isn't forced to write his own license, and because it promotes explicit licensing of individual's work before it becomes an issue- like when some other dweeb steals it and puts their name on it.

There, see Dvorak? That wasn't so hard. It has a purpose. To promote explicit licensing (a prophylactic, to be sure) and to promote sane licensing so content can be re-used.

Re:Creative Commons

[BiggyP]

Creative commons allows you to stipulate how you wish your licensed works to be used, if you want to let people know that they're allowed to use all your stuff for non-commercial purposes, for free, you can do that quickly and easily by attaching a CC license. The automatic protection under copyright law doesn't give you any such benefit.

Re:Creative Commons

[jhoger]

Well I won't give Dvorak a page hit; I don't think he's really a drooling idiot, so it must be a troll.

But I'll counter his argument with one example where CC worked beautifully:

I asked Leo Brodie author of Thinking Forth to allow republication of his book under a Creative Commons license. We discussed different options... he chose a "non-commercial" clause, but allowed derivative works and share-alike.

So what we have is a LaTeX repub and PDF downloadable from SourceForge by anyone. And he is selling hardcopies of the book through a print-on-demand publisher.

A project is in the works to update all the classic Forth examples to modern Forth usage. Also a translation to Spanish of the LaTeX repub is underway.

How could Dvorak be so obtuse? Of course Brodie could negotiate a separate license with each person who wanted to make some use of Thinking Forth, or just sell copies. But without granting additional rights, he wouldn't have gotten the free labor and TF would have stayed out of print and an orphaned works for 70 PLUS YEARS.

The Creative Commons licenses are just a legal tool, that's all. It's like going to the bookstore and buying a bunch of standard contracts. It reduces the time, if any, you have to spend with a real lawyer in order to grant rights to use your work beyond what copyright allows, safely, to a wide audience without negotating with each user individually, one-on-one.

Simple, understandable. Dvorak, you're just a troll.

-- John.

Re:Creative Commons

[alfedenzo]

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.

Re:Creative Commons

[tdonahue]

John Dvorak not understand?!?!?!? Oh my , what is this world coming to? Dvorak always gets everything he blabers about

Come on, this is John Dvorak that you are talking about, from everything I have EVER read by him, I would have to say he is the second-most incompetant technical columnist that has ever graced this world.

Re:Creative Commons

[cicho]

Yes, and by default it's copyrighted in such a way that all use of the work is prohibited (unless it's "fair use"). That is emphatically not the point of CC. You use CC when you want to relax, not restrict, the rights granted by copyright by default. So you don't have to write your own legalese, which any non-laywer is likely o screw up.

Some have said above "hire your own lawyer". Only a lawyer will say this. How much am I willing to pay a copyright lawyer to draft me a license for something I want to give away for free? Lessig has done a great, great favor to people who themselves do favors to millions of strangers.

"open source" is just a description.

[Some Random Username]

The GPL IS an open source license, despite RMS's ludicrous blathering to the contrary. The source code is open, so it is open source. Its simply a descriptive term, it does not imply or require any sort of membership in any kind of club. The OSI guys do not own the words "open source", nor can they redefine the meaning of these words.

Saying open source is not the same as saying OSI, so you and RMS can both quit getting your panties in a bunch over nothing and trying to redefine the english language to suit your agendas.