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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?
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
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.
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.
No, Stallman is not slipping, reality is.
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.
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.