Andrew Orlowski Answers Mail on Creative Commons

chronicon writes "Andrew Orlowski takes another swipe at Creative Commons licensing with a look through the mailbag of responses he received from a previous diatribe on the subject. It's obvious to Mr. Orlowski that creativity is 'all about the benjamins.' Yet one interesting point he throws out has me pondering, is a Creative Commons License permanently irrevocable once it's put out there?"

Comments

Making a Big Deal of Nothing

[TheSpoom]

Well, first things first:

Yet one interesting point he throws out has me pondering, is a Creative Commons License permanently irrevocable once it's put out there?

In answer, this is from the CC Attribution-NonCommercial license (bold and italics added for emphasis):

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...

So clearly it *is* permanantly irrevocable, which is a good thing. If it weren't, how could the end user be assured that her or his freedoms to use the software (or whatever) under the license would still be there in the future? This way, an author can't just say "this isn't working out for me, now you have to pay me $10 to keep using [whatever]," as that would be tantamount to extortion.

Additionally, from the linked Register article:

The use of an irrevocable Commons license, which effectively ends any hope of the artist being compensated by the creative industries, doesn't seem fair or sensible for most readers.

This is why there is a Non-Commercial version of the license. And this is also why having a work distributed under a CC license doesn't prevent you from ALSO licensing it under other licenses! That's the whole idea of the NC versions of the license: if someone wants to use your work commercially, they can contact you to work out another arrangement so that you would get some form of compensation for the profits that they might make off of your work.

But seriously, if you don't like the license, make your own! Nobody's forcing people to use these licenses and I don't see why this person seems to think that they're creating a "crisis" of sorts. Creative Commons licenses are just an easy way of having your work distributed the way you want, and with a license written by a lawyer so that there are no possible loopholes for which someone could take advantage.