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Creative Commons Urged To Drop Non-Free Clauses In CC 4.0
TheSilentNumber writes "A member of Students for Free Culture has just published a thorough and detailed post calling for the retirement of the non-free clauses, NoDerivatives (ND) and NonCommercial (NC). They state, 'The NC and ND clauses not only depend on, but also feed misguided notions about their purpose and function.' and that 'Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense.'"
Note that the opinions expressed are of the author alone and not necessarily the entire organization. More info on the process of revising the CC licenses.
One of the worrying things about using CC material is: What is a derivative work?
This matters for the viral/copyleft CC-SA (CC Share and Share Alike) license.
For example, if you have a web page, and you either excerpt or publish a full Wikipedia article, along with your other content, have you just given permission to people to use your content from that webpage?
Is the virality of the CC-SA limited just to the part which you excerpt, or the whole webpage, or your whole website?
I.e., you include some CC-SA material, and now your entire website is considered a "work", and it's a derivative. What if you also have GPL and GFDL stuff in the mix? Which license wins?
If you include CC-SA stuff on a CD, does the entire CD become CC-SA?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Newsworth? I don't know. But absolutely Awarenessworth! Currently, more and more people are releasing their own music and videos under the CC licenses for our own free enjoyment, and also it's one of the greatest forces we have against the ever increasing stupidity of the big labels.
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I like using NC for images, and I think people are a lot more likely to release their images under this (without this clause they may be less likely release them as CC at all, and just keep them closed).
I really dislike that wikipedia won't accept NC stuff, though.
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If I say, make an art asset and post it to say, OpenGameArt, I have a choice of options.
I can list it as one of the CC licenses, for instance, or even under a derivative of the GPL.
Personally, I am a fan of CC:SA. I don't mind a small time person using that asset to make a game. That's why I donated it in the first place. That does not mean I want say, Zygna to go "Oh, art assets? FOR FREE!? OM NOM NOM NOM!"
It is this latter one that I feel warrants the "no commercial" verbiage, even today. The tradgedy of the commons happens when the commons is not protected, and happens without fail. Would I care if a small "for profit" project, like is often done with humble bundle used it? Not so much, as long as they gave attribution in 10pt font in the credits or smething. But Zygna? Fuck them.
The problem is that it is a binary on/off situation with commercial use. I would happily give an indie project commercial use rights, but it would be a cold day in hell when a major studio would get it.
If there were some finer granularity, I would use it, but in place of that, "no commercial" is at least a step in the right direction.
Removing it let's abusive companies go om nom nom with community assets.
This is really, really silly.
Counterexamples:
1. I write an opinion piece for my local paper on why G.W. Bush was the worst US president in history. Under any free license, someone else can write a revised version in which my opinions are all changed, then distribute it with attribution to me and the reviser. Fair use doesn't allow this. An ND license does what I want, which is to prevent this misrepresentation of my opinions.
2. Alice Randall wrote a book called The Wind Done Gone using the setting and characters of Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell's estate sued Randall and won. If Gone With the Wind had been distributed under an ND license, this would have been prevented. Under a free license, it would have been allowed. Fair use doesn't allow this use.
3. I make coffee mugs with Harry Potter characters on them and sell them on the internet without paying a royalty to J.K. Rowling. If Rowling had chosen any free license, this would have been allowed. With an NC license, it's prohibited, which is what she wants. It doesn't fall under fair use.
Yes, this is blindingly obvious. In all three examples above, the original author had no intention of contributing to a shared commons.
Perhaps the silliest thing of all about this is the belief that people can somehow be prevented from using NC or ND licenses. Nobody can prevent this. The CC organization could "deprecate" them, and this would have absolutely no effect.
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A summary of this article is:
I want CC No Commercial (NC) and CC No Derivatives (ND) clauses removed because they don't really support free. Works don't enrich the commons unless you can do whatever you want with them. Also, the NC clause should be eliminated because it is really hard to define commercial. Does commercial mean you can't share a file on a website that has ads?
My opinion is that a little free is better than not free. I should be able to donate my work to the commons without expecting to see it on a billboard. Which has actually happened. In terms of the commercial example, I think we can all judge when things move over the line from donation based to blatantly commercial. The good news is that it is up to me as a rights holder to enforce the license. I can allow uses of my file in ad supported web sites, but object to my song being used in a local TV ad. Yes, there are ambiguities in everything. That's life.
If you object to these licenses, don't use 'em. Or anything with them.
Disclaimer: I've licensed songs I've written as CC NC.
One of the worrying things about using CC material is: What is a derivative work?
That is an excellent question and one that directly relates to my use of the 'NC' licence. When releasing educational materials I'm happy with everyone getting to use them for free and sharing them with others but I do not want to see them get incorporated into a text book or used as supporting material for a textbook which publishers are charging students obscene prices for (especially as those prices are one of the primary motivations for making the material in the first place!).
While you might be able to argue that a textbook which incorporates pages of text and/or questions is a derivative work many publishers now offer flexible publishing options where you can pick and choose what chapters and sections of a book are included for your course. In such a case does all the book count as a derivative work or just the sections or chapters where they use CC content adapted to the book?
While the term 'non-commercial' might be ambiguous so is the term 'derivative works' so if ambiguity is an argument to drop the term both should be dropped. Personally I thing the argument for dropping the 'NC' clause is more to do with the author's political persuasions than any other argument given. I think keeping the option to give us a choice is important. Looking at open source there is clear support for both BSD-like and GPL-like licences. What is nice with CC is that it accommodates both camps under one umbrella. If they drop the 'NC' I predict a licence fork to fix the omission.
Which is why the Students for Free Culture wants to make it more daunting for artists to migrate to free licences by making it an 'all or nothing' deal. Brilliant way to shoot everyone in the foot, guys.
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The NC version of the license is the only one I would ever willingly use, and that's coming from someone who is very familiar with copyright law. There's no misinformation involved. It simply doesn't bother me whether the definition of commercial use is precisely defined or vague, and honestly, I'd prefer that it be deliberately vague. If you are anywhere near that line, you should ask for permission. If you aren't anywhere near that line, you don't have to.
The only situation where it shouldn't be obvious would be posting something on a website on which you also sell ads. My rule on that is pretty simple: if you are an individual and those ads are basically intended to cover your bandwidth bill, you're fine. If you're a company or other organization, or if you are an individual who is making a living off of ad revenue, you're clearly on the other side of that line. If you're worried, ask.
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I guess that would work within the realm of the free culture movement, but I was thinking even more generally. Any cause you can name—environmentalism, multiculturalism, gender equality, whatever—has overeager radicals who don't want (or know how) to balance their vision with public acceptance. They may not even be wrong about what they're talking about (I think a lot more people would agree with RMS in theory than in practice, for example), and yet they can do a horrendous amount of damage to their own public image. It's daunting to imagine how far back society's been set by the misanthropy of overenthusiasm.
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There is natural conflict in the development process, because after spending hundreds or thousands of hours creating something cool, it's hard to let go. This conflict is especially difficult if you decide that releasing your project as open source is the best way to distribute it and get others to use and extend it. The first knee-jerk reaction is to attempt to retain as much control as you can -- "Yeah, it's open source, but I don't want you using it commercially or as the basis of something else." -- If you follow through with that restriction, you're essentially releasing source code or design files for a closed project. It's open in name only.
Once you recognize that your biggest fear is actually the idea that someone will take your idea and do a better (or more successful) job at it than you have, you can begin to step forward. The first step is to understand that if you have a really good idea, someone will clone it. In fact, it's likely that 15 people will clone it. And that's good, because they might do a better job and there's nothing from stopping you from incorporating their good ideas into your project (a derivative work of a derivative work!). Whether or not you explicitly grant permission for someone to use your ideas, rest assured that they will. To that end, it makes the most sense to release with a CC Share Alike requirement that ensures that your ideas and their derivatives stay public and accessible to all.
Say, I publish a book under my own name. I don't care if people reproduce it on their websites, and I don't care if commercial enterprises included it into their own collections. Hey, it's not the money I'm after, so they can sell it too, if they want. What I do care about however, is that nobody comes and starts modifying (adding to, modifying or deleting from) that text... because my name and reputation are associated with it. That's what ND is for. Even if CC removed ND from its list of options, nothing prevents me from releasing said book under an ND-like condition nonetheless.
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I'm someone who writes and publishes music under CC-NC-SA. Since I'm doing artistic stuff rather than engineering stuff with it, it's possible my perspective is a bit different, but I suspect the argument will apply just as well.
I'm not afraid someone will do it better. I'm afraid that some organization will take what I've given away, copy it, make a token modification, and copyright it, thus turning the work that I made as a gift into something that has a price on it, all without paying me a dime. They might even be able to turn around and issue DMCA takedowns and sue people for performing my work, claiming that they're really performing their version rather than my version. They've now taken free artistic work and made it no longer free. In other words, they aren't really adding any value at all, just taking value from me and from the public and declaring it theirs.
An illustrative case: Pete Seeger took biblical verses and wrote the song Turn, Turn, Turn, releasing it into the public domain. Several other folk musicians performed it, and it gained in popularity, and Pete finally recorded it in 1962. In 1965, the Byrds recorded it, and now most people who've heard of the song think that they wrote it originally, and some others think Bob Dylan wrote it. Had Pete Seeger not been a relatively well-known figure, it's quite possible his contribution would have been forgotten entirely.
If somebody wants to take my stuff and use it in a commercial project, releasing it under CC-NC-SA doesn't say they can't do it, it just says that they need to get in touch with me and work out some sort of arrangement. In practical terms, it means that if someone else wants to sing my song among friends or something, they can just do it, but if somebody wants to put it on an album or book or something like that, we need to talk about it.
I am officially gone from
I'm one of the guys behind an open source music hardware project (meeblip.com) and strongly against NC/ND restrictions. They exist out of fear and stand counter to the central tenant of open source (*anyone* should be able to study, modify, distribute, make and sell the design or a derivative work based on that design).
Sorry,
The key assumption in your argumentation: "open source software/hardware" and "open artistic creation" are identical. I assert that there's a fundamental difference between the two:
1. software/hardware is an engineering problem, and the results can be improved, polished, maintained over time in sync with technological advances.
2. By contrast, an artistic creation is meant to transmit/produce emotions/feelings/sensations etc... For some creations, the author may feel that any change in the expression would alter too much the intentions s/he had when creating it
Say whatever one may, no-one - maybe not even the author - can "improve" on a specific artistic creation
Yes, you can try to use an existing creation to build something equally appealing to the people, but in doing so you are going to dilute the original authors intentions (if not outright destroying them entirely).
Another example
Pink Floyd's attorney Robert Howe describes the band's albums as "seamless pieces." No-one who's heard 'The Dark Side Of The Moon' would quibble with that.
You know, I do agree with that and not only in respect with The Dark side of the moon.
My opinion is: the "open source" or "closed license" character for an artistic creation is irrelevant - the creator's wish is to be respected . Anything else would show a lack of respect for the original creative act, which I would say is more dangerous for society than the potential loss of another derivative creation.
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Those extremists provide real value to their cause.
Pretend, for a moment, that society has to pick a number on a scale from 0-100. Right now, public opinion on average thinks the number should be around 40, and mainstream media generally considers it acceptable to discuss proposals that involve numbers as low as 25 and as high as 55. Now, suppose there's well-funded group A that thinks this number should be 0, and a well-funded group B that thinks this number should be 80, and both have legitimate and reasonable-sounding arguments for holding their respective position. If group A adopts the moderate approach, they'll advocate for 25. If group B adopts the extremist approach, they'll advocate for 80. If both groups have equally convincing arguments and can get their message out equally, the public opinion will shift not from 40 down to 25 but from 40 to 52, because group B has successfully convinced a significant number of people that it's reasonable and socially acceptable to think that numbers in the 55-80 range are right.
A practical example of this in action: 20 years ago, gay marriage or gay civil union was unthinkable in the US. In general, 'respectable' liberal political groups didn't want to touch the issue at all, because what was considered the range of acceptable opinion was a spectrum from "Ok, the police shouldn't be able to arrest gay people and throw them in jail for being gay" to "Beat 'em up and force them to be straight". But the less respectable gay rights folks kept up the pressure for gay marriage to be legal, as complete extremists and nutjobs for at least a decade. And by doing that, the idea started entering popular culture, and eventually got some political decisions going their way, and now is legal in many places and has the support of over half of Americans.
I am officially gone from
You don't know how right you are friend. I mean if you were a company looking at using and contributing to an Open Source project so you could use the code in some hardware you were working on wouldn't you think twice after RMS named a company by name with an attack clause in the new GPL? I know I would, it makes him look like he is using the license to settle personal scores, which I'd argue he is. Considering how many nasty things he's had to say about Google I wouldn't be surprised if GPL V4 has an "Anti-Androidization" clause in it.
But that is the problem with zealotry in a nutshell, its "You are with me or against me" with no middle ground. Removing the middle ground of ND and NC will simply make that many more shy away from using a CC license and letting us enjoy their work because they won't want to see that work sold or even twisted, like the girl that had her picture taken for a car ad and ended up in magazines half the world away in ads that made her sound like a hooker.
Isn't it funny though how you can change one or two words, here and there, and TFA sounds like a pro corporate speech? I always found it amusing that zealots on either side of a debate use similar enough language that all it would take is a few alterations to turn one into the other, kinda like how you can take all the anti-BSD posts about "stealing" and "theft" and with just a few words make it into a pro *.A.A speech. I always found that kinda interesting, although when you point that out oh boy do the zealots get mad!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually I don't think that is what happened with gay people at all. I live in a small church college town in the middle of the bible belt, where you'd think it would be VERY far right on the issue of gays, buts its not, why? Because gay people quit hiding and instead of getting in everyone's face like the extremists simply chose to live their lives, no different than anyone else.
Now nobody says a word about the gal working at the cigarette shop, or the guy that works at the deli,or the dozens of others, they are simply open and make no bones about it one way or another. Its a lot easier to hate some group if you've never (to your knowledge) had any contact with them, its a lot harder when you know you are talking about that nice young man that cuts your hair or the girl waiting on you at your favorite diner.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.