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RMS says Creative Commons Unacceptable
Mr A Coward writes "Richard Stallman has stated in an interview that he no longer supports Creative Commons licenses. In the interview carried on LinuxP2P.com, and which is largely about the P2P and DRM issues, Stallman ends by saying: 'I no longer endorse Creative Commons. I cannot endorse Creative Commons as a whole, because some of its licenses are unacceptable.' He suggests instead using the GPL for creative works." The crux of his argument is that, since he disagrees with some of the CC licenses, and people tend to lump them all together, he feels compelled to reject them all. What's your take? Are some Creative Commons licenses worth using, even if others aren't?
RMS: People have a right to share copies of published works; P2P programs are simply a means to do it more usefully, and that is a good thing.
If we are going to mince words maybe we should start with an honest appraisal of the difference between sharing (as in borrowing a book) and copying. All of us who make a living being creative understand the shortcomings of current copyright legislation and know that we need people to think about creative work in new ways if we are going to take IP law into the 21st century; we know tilting in favor of multi-national corporations at the expense of individuals is a mistake, but we are not going to get anywhere with the type of lazy thinking which asserts things like, "If copyright law forbids people from sharing, copyright law is wrong." I'll take Lawrence Lessig's ideas over Mr. Stallman's any day.
If it's true (as RMS says in the interview) that the various Creative Commons licenses are "more different than similar", and if they differ on issues you care about, then yes, I would have to agree with Stallman that they need to be discussed separately, that you can't make a blanket statement saying either "I support CC licenses" or "I reject CC licenses". If some Creative Commons licenses are worth using and others aren't, it would be best to stop talking about them collectively as "Creative Commons licenses" and instead discuss them under their own names.
I think it's time we just start ignoring RMS. Once the national media noticed him about 5-6 years ago, his ego has tipped the scales. He's so far off the deep end that I for one don't want to be associated with his ideas.
It's like we're all saying "Open source is a good thing", and he's now picking up that banner, saying "Unless it's completely open and completely free in every possible sense of the word, it's wrong". That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying "Open source is a good thing".
sig?
I stopped listening to him sometime around the GNU/Linux debacle. He doesn't really provide much value to anyone who doesn't want to be hard left.
Don't get me wrong, the man did some great things in bringing forth the Free Software movement, but now it seems like his goal is to destroy everything that doesn't fit his ideals, and that's just as dangerous as what he opposes.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
What Stallman is saying sounds, as usual, intellectually consistent. Because some licenses that are called Creative Commons licenses include restrictions that Stallman does not support, Stallman will not endorse the Creative Commons brand. In other words, he will not automatically give you a pat on the back just because you use a Creative Commons license; he wants to know what the terms of the license are first.
Sounds fine to me. I've never been a big supporter of Creative Commons for much the same reason. All Creative Commons seems to be, to me, is a collection of license that someone has paid a lawyer to draft up and then donated that work to the public. You can pick and choose between the licenses and their clauses. It's a generous donation and it's very handy.
Then again, I've never seen how Creative Commons amounts to the "social movement" that people make it out to be. Stallman, whether you agree with him or not, seems devoutly intent on shaking up the foundations of the modern concept of intellectual property. By comparison, Creative Commons licenses seem like little more than tools for helping people navigate the status quo.
Breakfast served all day!
Are some Creative Commons licenses worth using, even if others aren't?
Absolutely! The organization as a whole is trying to better society. I read many of Lawrence Lessig's articles and agree with just about everything he says. His goal is to provide options. A full range of options. Pick the ones that suit your needs and ignore the rest.
After all, isn't that what we do with our Linux systems? We pick the distro and packages we want and ignore the rest. If you don't like OpenOffice it doesn't mean you shouldn't use Linux! Just don't use the parts you don't like!
Developers: We can use your help.
If I write something, I get to pick the license. If Stallman doesn't like it, I'll sleep just fine at night and will have no problems looking at myself in the mirror.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Stallman is the Pat Robertson of the open source movement. Millions of reasonable people, shouted down in the public by a loud-mouthed, wild-eyed zealot who has gone off the deep end and provides fodders for their enemies. Like Robertson, he lives off his glory days accomplishments, while continuing to have an eery sway over many of the new generation who are in fact much better than him. Thank you for writing Emacs, GCC, etc., but the new generation has come along and really moved that work forward and then some, and let's not forget the fact that Apache, Mozilla and others exist independently of his work.
Thank you for your contributions, but you're not relevant anymore to the degree you aspire to be. IMO, the real voice of reason on this issue is Linus Torvalds with his "we are not crusaders" mentality that is more libertarian than left-liberal.
There are many times when "Screw you guys, I'm going home" is a valid response, but Stallman has done it so many times, about so many Open Source projects that don't adhere to Pope Stallman's ex cathedra Encyclical on The True and Only GPL that it's lost all meaning. Yeah, RMS, we've figured out nothing that you haven't personally blessed is pure and holy enough for you. Next question.
Perhaps his most impressive feat is making Eric Raymond look reasonable by comparison...
Crow T. Trollbot
I like the GPL and use it for software, but it's just not right for things like text. For instance, I can use my GPL-given right to revise and extend Richard Stallman's text to read:
.)
I love the Creative Commons. I think the Creative Commons is great as a whole, because some of its licenses are not unacceptable. In fact, I want Larry Lessig to have my baby. Wait that's not feasible.
(Changes in bold
What's right for software is not right for matters of opinion or fact. The distinction between sources and binaries don't matter here and actually confuse the right decisions. Nor is there any reason to believe that someone would get anything out of the ability to revise and extend anyone else's words. Okay, it might make sense for a collaborative manual, but I think there are many cases where the right leads to the trouble we're seeing with the clever editors of the Wikipedia.
Given that CC tries to create analogous licenses for non-software to those that already exist for software (sharealike == GPL, attribution required == BSD) I would say RMS is entitled to his opinion but I respectfully disagree. We know RMS disapproves of the BSD license and prefers the GPL, on account of maintaining the freedom of the software - fine, his opinion given freely. He doesn't seem to explicitly say so, but does he disapprove of the CC attribution license? His problem seems to be one of terms and definitions - not all CC licenses are free it's true, but this sounds more like a small marketing problem for the folks behind CC, rather like the perennial "open source" v. "free software" debate (neither term truly captures the meaning of GPL-like licenses). He does note that the GPL is unsuited, in his opinion, to a book or printed work and I'm struggling to see how it can be applied to other artistic works: do any other class of works (baking recipes being the only example I can think of right now, or maybe the exact colour combinations and brush techniques used in a painting?) have the distinction between human-readable/machine unreadable and human unreadable/machine readable representations of the same work? The GPL is all about ensuring software stays human readable, which is fine, but this isn't the problem with other types of creative work - the problem there is how to legally maintain one's right to a monopoly on the distribution of the work as a whole whilst also allowing others to use substantial portions to build their own works. Let people choose the license they want, is my opinion.
Funny I was just discussing this with a coworker today.
I agree completely with RMS. The Creative Commons licenses are not something that should be lumped together.
They also have several legal problems. Because there are 10 different possibilities for CC license combinations, it's difficult to determine whether all 10 are enforcable or not. The process for vetting even one license is hard enough, much less 10 distinct licenses.
The other is the "no commercial use" licenses. I think these would work fine for a work where the ownership is tightly controlled, but for a collaborative work where no one can authorize license changes, it raises an enforcability question.
If you were to sue someone for infringement, you'd generally sue them for the monetary damages caused by their misuse of your work. If it's impossible for anyone to commercially exploit the work, there's no way there could be any damages. You therefore really have nothing to sue for, and no way to enforce.
For tightly held works, you can claim that you have the ability to license the work under another license if you desire, and therefore there is a commercial potential, and a potential for monetary damages. For works with tainted ownership (say 100 contributers, some dead, many with no contact information), it would be hard to argue that anyone anywhere could ever commercially exploit the project, and there's no basis for claiming damages.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
If the community asked him to step down, would he?
Community: "Please Mr Stallman, stop being yourself."
In other words, step down from what? He does what he does because he is on a mission. People on a mission follow the mission, not the "community".
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
That's who RMS is.
If you wanted someone in a stuffed shirt that business people could relate to, you should have invited Bruce Perens instead.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The power of the GPL is completely predicated on the power of copyright. Without copyright, there can be no GPL. RMS's goal isn't to achieve "the freedom for anyone to distribute any published work," but rather to achieve a world in which published works are themselves free -- free to be built upon and creatively refigured, and free to contribute to the common good. To quote Eben Moglen, the goal is to create "a commons, to which anyone may add but from which no one may subtract." Hell yes, it's ideological. To me, that's a good thing.
:wq
No, Stallman is not slipping, reality is.
Reading the article and seeing the responses to the questions was very much like listening to the senate hearings. Ie, very clear answers when the question is aligned with the agenda or beliefs of the person being interviewed/questioned, but very bluntly vague when not in line.
What gets me is that RMS notes that people, in general, lump all of the CC licenses as one entity. He notes that they need to be addressed seperately.
Having said that, RMS is lucid in his responses. I think what gets peoples' goats about RMS is that he is basically unwavering and uncompromising when it comes to his ideals. This has and always will be the case.
My only wish from the article would have been RMS clarifying what portions of the CC Licensing system he considers to be acceptable and what parts he doesn't. Wholesale dismissal of the CC licenses is like getting a paper back with a big fat "F/0" and a note at the bottom saying "Do better next time", without any indication on the paper of what was wrong. (Bad experience with some college professors.
Why gets me is why people keep feeling surprised or shocked when RMS restates his ideals and views: free as in freedom, complete freedom, no restrictions. Yes, it's a hard left. Yes, it's idealistic. Yes, it would cripple companies and businesses that depend on the restriction of information-based goods(music, movies,etc).
But he does have a point. 100 years from now, how will we access DRM'd content that should have gone public domain? How will we read ebooks that can't be readliy converted to other formats? Same with encrypted and locked music, movies, etc?
Personally, he sounds alot like a cross between a hippie, priest, and lawyer, no offense meant to the hippie, priest, or lawyer. But just because he sounds like that, doesn't mean he isn't onto something. It's just not very palatable.
Winged Power Photography
If it were anyone else they could be safely ignored, but RMS brought us the GPL, and it was through his uncomprimising commitment to his vision that we have the movement of Open Source today. Yes people - Open Source, he is one of the fathers of Open Source even if he has disowned his own child. The point is that the man is uncomprimising to the point of being irrational.
But is he - in this instance - being irrational? Well, the creative commons typically used by Flickr, is simply a means of easily defining the rights you are providing. It can mean a number of things, and I think he has a point - that its confusing; you have to read the rights for every bit of work, rather than being able to trust that a creative commons mark means you have certain rights.
I still wouldn't use the GPL for writing or music because the GPL has clauses specifically aimed at software. There is no "source code" for music, and no obligation to distribute the score of the music along with the audio recordings for example. However, the creative commons is a diluted concept if you don't gauranttee certain rights to people, and they have to dig to see what their rights actually are.
Stallmans problem isn't one of intellect as such, but rather poor communication. He communicates in a uncomprimising and arrogant way; his way or the highway; and is unwilling to be part of a bigger team that he has no direct control over. That is why Open Source came about - we escaped the limits of Stallmans retoric.
Stallman still doesn't get Open Source I think - The Hurd being an example more of Cathedral style than Bazzar style development. Open Source has overtaken him for a reason, and that reason is a positive feedback cycle generated by a community of willing participants.
The big difference between open source and free software is the uncomprimising ideological dogma of Stallman. Free Software was about the Stallmans dictatorship; his word was law in that universe. Open Source on the other hand starts with the principles of Free Software, but does not insist the developers have the same ideological passions as Stallman.
That said, Open Source has not diluted the principle (as the Creative Commoms may have) by retaining a clear statement about what is and is not Open Source.
Now maybe in a reality-free zone where everybody works for the common good and nobody takes more than his* fair share, that would be a reasonable thing to pass off as a fact. But Stallman's "facts" are impractial in the real world.
Human beings have produced great art, science, and engineering for millennia in the absence of copyright protection. The assertion that copyrights and patents have any social or economic merit at all is at best unproven.
So, the ideologues trying to push unproven ideas on the rest of us are people like you, people who make strained arguments that somehow society needs to bear the costs and complexities of IP law.
Go prove your case before you whine about Stallman.
I know what a foaming-at-the-mouth "RMS is the antichrist" troll I used to be here on Slashdot, but I've lately come to realise the error of my ways, for two reasons:-
a) It makes me look like a fool, and
b) There is now absolutely no need for me to do it anyway. With the amount of crazed diatribes he's been releasing lately, he's doing a far better job himself of convincing everyone of what a generally undesirable human being he is than I ever could. His fame for his prior contributions has served as the rope, and over the past 2-3 years he's done an absolutely smashing job of using it to hang himself. He's now on the fast track to complete irrelevance.
How true the mathematical proverb is. Every problem does, indeed, have its own solution.
It's just my opinion, but I suspect that GPLv3 will not be used by many software packages at all. GPLv2 is a license. GPLv3 is a rant.
-h-
In a way, history is repeating itself.
During the 1850's there were all these groups that wanted to work out a friendly solution so that the slave states could get along with the free states. Rules to be nicer to slaves, shorter slave terms, more clearly defined boundaries, and so on and so on. Well they didn't get it, it was an all or nothing game. The very nature of the beast was coercive and restrictive in a way that could not survive the industrial revolution.
Well today, there are people who want a "compromise" with the copyright system. A shorter term here, a nicer enforcement there, more controll to the original author here, and so on and so on. What these people don't understand that the very nature of beast centers arround coercing how people can use and manipulate information at their disposal - the anti thesis of the information age. The only kind of copyright that can survive the information age, is one that can not be enforced.
Instead of crying about that, or clinging to old ways, what people need to do is learn how to make money from content services and not from content controll.
Has there actually been cases of brands being stolen in this way? Everyone seems to talk about it as though it were inevitable, but it seems plausible that even if copyright laws allowed a rival company to steal it's franchise, actual fans would always prefer the original makers, and view the copy as an entirely separate work. While they can steal ideas, they can't steal people. A rival company may try to do the Simpsons without Groening, but it will flop, over and over.
I posit that such a nightmare scenario is entirely illusionary, especially for franchises that are worth protecting.
Stallman's problems are many, but that he's not mainstream isn't the main problem. (That he comes across as a nutter however is a problem, and is probably due to a lack of social skills common to many a "geek"). I think we should be calling for a total abolition of copyright, but here's why...
We should be finding ways to allow people MORE freedom (while still compensating software creators, artists and the like). Stallman's taken a draconian approach that actually means that there are less places you can use the software that most people have written. He's like the anti-terror legislator that talks about freedom while whittling away all of our freedoms supposedly for the common good. He's destroying the very freedom he claims to cherish.
Ideally once a piece of software is written it should be usuable by anyone who wishes to use it. Anything that gets in the way of that. DRM, software licenses etc. is bad. It means you either have to get the permission of an author who might not wish to give it, (or will only give it if financially compensated to an amount that makes your whole project no longer economically feasible), or if other Intellectual Property laws allow you can write your own from scratch IF you have the expertise. What all of this leads to is duplication of effort, inefficiency and people not having access to software that's out there.
What we need to do is find a way to compensate artists, software authors and inventors WITHOUT limiting distribution (in the case of software, both binary and source distribution should not be limited). I don't believe the author/artist should have control of their work once it's released, but they should have a right to the FRUITS of their labour - ie. if there's money being made, they should get some of it. This is quite a huge challenge technically, and a fundamental principle that no one in the mainstream is even attempting to address. However, if we could do it, we'd live in a world where source code is available for you to examine and modify, new cures and treatments aren't held to ransom by the inventing company, music distribution cartels can't come after you etc. etc. I think it's possible though, so why isn't there anyone persuing it? Simple there's more money to be made this way by the greedy, and those who can manipulate the system.
Too bad too.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Then again, I've never seen how Creative Commons amounts to the "social movement" that people make it out to be.
The fact that you've heard of CC at all shows that it's having some effect as a movement.
What the CC movement is ultimately about is showing people that there's more to protecting your work than simply slapping a big © symbol on it. What if you demand attribution, but don't care about duplication? Copyright is not a binary thing. CC firstly educates that there are different options for different uses. It shows that if people start using CC, there's much more usable content out there for people to share and build on. And by creating and sharing the licences and making them easy to apply, it removes the largest stumbling block in the way of people who want to share their stuff while still exerting some control.
Creating the licences is pointless if nobody uses them. You have to get out there and show people how and why. CC's rapidly accelerating acceptance is evidence that they're doing a decent job of it.
That said, the busybox objection was quite reasonable.
1) The objection was reasonable
2) He tried to comment
3) He couldn't make his way past their filters.
I hope he is moderated up to 5 insightful/informative, so the drafters of the GPL3 may see it.
I don't know of ANY good way of constructing filters so that you can get all the messages you need to get without drowning in spam and other garbage. It's a real problem. But the reported attempt doesn't sound like a phenomenally acceptable filter.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The crux of his argument is that, since he disagrees with some of the CC licenses, and people tend to lump them all together, he feels compelled to reject them all.
I feel the same way. I don't agree with every last nutball opinion that comes out of RMS's mouth, so I now feel compelled to reject all of his views.
Not really. But what a loon.
Stallman has clearly expressed in the past that non-software works like art and the written word don't "require" the same type of "freedom" that software does. While publishing a software title the traditional way is downright unethical (he says), publishing a book the traditional way is just fine (also ethical: documentation manuals with GFDL 'invariant sections' that demand that all copies include unmodified political screeds). So if I choose to use a -more- lenient license than traditional publishing, like ANY (even the most limited) CC licenses, giving MORE rights to the reader - that should also be perfectly ethical. But somehow, it ain't.
Why? Because ego trumps ethics when you're RMS. Here's a guy who has defined his whole existence through a poorly thought-out armchair moral philosophy about software that wouldn't withstand five minutes scrutiny in a 101 class. But it drives him crazy (well, crazier) that the open content and free culture folks don't bow their heads toward his licenses like the software people do. So his ethical stand morphs, somehow now keeping traditional publishing ethical but making the unquestionably freer and more open CC licenses unethical. It's an amazing contortion job. I'd call it self-deception if I thought the guy were self-aware enough to realize what he was doing.
Honestly, I think RMS is a genius. Copyleft - brilliant idea. I've had my hands in Free Software for nearly two decades and I still believe that, no matter what you call them, liberal licenses and open development systems are incredibly powerful, liberating tools. Many of his concepts are important and right-on, in the broad strokes if not always in every little detail.
But he's also something of a kook, and he's certainly no moral compass for the masses. Can we stop pretending that every half-baked utterance that squeaks out of this guy's beard-hole is important? Some of it is great stuff, but a lot of his blather is just chest-beating or pointlessly insisting that every shade of gray has to be very definitively labeled as either black or white. I hate to play this card, but sometimes you gotta call a spade a spade: this probably has something to do with his autism. I have a relative with a spectrum disorder and the symptoms are eerily similar.
Eccentrics are great, they contribute lots of great things to society, I love 'em - but eventually you gotta come to the conclusions that at least half of what they say is nuts. There's no reason for every goofball comment the guy makes should be a tech headline. Can't we get over this already?
and I can't type very well right now. I'll do my best, anyway. The Disney chain boss has left for five minutes, so I may have time to bang out a quick response.
Instead of crying about that, or clinging to old ways, what people need to do is learn how to make money from content services and not from content controll.
Nice idea. Let me know when your company goes public. In the mean time, ponder the notion that it takes a long time for human systems to change, and that usually an awful lot of experimentation is required before the solution that history regards as "obvious" manifests itself. While giving everything away seems obvious to you, if you ran a three-person company, or a three-hundred person company, or a three-thousand person company, would you bet the company and the livelihood of your employees on your deeply held conviction?
The Creative Commons approach is anything but clinging to old ways. It's a means of providing more collaboration, more free exchange of culture, and more options. It provides freedom of choice, a way out of the old one-size-fits-all model of traditional copyright. Like the GPL, it does so within the existing copyright regime.
Sure, it's not as black and white an approach as the GPL. It makes it tougher to determine who should be flying X-Wings and who belongs in a TIE Fighter, but it works in the real world. It is showing people that they can control the level of copyright protection of their works. I won't be at all surprised when more and more content businesses see the light and start voluntarily restricting their control over content. In the mean time, all content creators are not malevolent, drool-fanged monsters trying to steal our precious bodily fluids. Sure, the RIAA are scaly reptiles, but most content creators of them are just honest people trying to make a buck, and in my opinion, bashing them over the head with wildly inflated historical analogies doesn't do anything to advance the dialogue.
Slavery? Come on.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ