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Open Source Beer Served Cold, With a Heated Licensing Discussion
sethopia writes "Sam Muirhead enjoys a couple of open source beers and delves into their licenses (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) and the recent CC Non Commercial license controversy. As Sam writes, 'Depending on your point of view, the Non Commercial license is either the methadone that can wean copyright junkies off their all-rights-reserved habit, or it is a gateway drug to the psychedelic and dangerously addictive world of open source and free culture.'"
What's next? Open-source chocolate chip cookies?
Is that Free as in beer, or Free as in beer?
I thought recipes weren't copyrightable anyway, and only particular encodings of recipes could be copyrighted.
Beer recipes are generally not that secret, visit a brewery and you're generally shown the full process and ingredients. It's true that most don't give the recipe away, but if you know your brewing it's not hard to reproduce. If you get talking to a brewer and show some interest they'll point you in the right direction. I might be ignorant, but I've never heard of a brewer suing another brewer over a recipe or beer making process. Most brewers are happy to share. Yeast is another matter, many breweries closely guard their yeast, but others give it away.
Can't it be both?
CC 'non-commercial' strikes me as actually overwhelmingly different, in terms of objectives and in terms of the interactions being planned for(or against) than the more software-focused GPL/LGPL/BSD/MIT crowd:
With the software-focused licenses, the thinking(regardless of which camp you fall into on the questions of which interests you value most highly) is really about the relationship between the original developer, intermediate bundlers/distributors, and end users. Some licenses(ie. BSD) prefer to impose basically no restrictions beyond attribution on the intermediate users, considering it sufficient that the original developer can do what they want, and the end user(while they may or may not have any access to the guts of whatever binaries they get from the intermediate bundlers) does have access to the original project. LGPL is more aggressive about protecting the interests of the original project; by requiring intermediate distributors of works that include the original to make their changes available; but doesn't go much further than BSD in terms of watching over the end user. GPL explicitly demands that the end user's interest in access to the code be preserved, and the AGPL and GPL3 address the same interests in the context of 'cloud' and 'tivoized' scenarios.
However, across all of that, 'commercial/noncommercial' isn't an area of distinction. Obviously, these licenses have an effect on the viability of certain commercial schemes; but they have no explicit objectives in that area: If you can find a way to make money by selling software that is available in source form under the GPL3, rock on. If your freedom to add whatever proprietary features to FreeBSD can't save you from being crushed by generic upstream FreeBSD, sucks to be you.
By contrast, the whole idea of 'commercial' vs. 'noncommercial' reflects an explicit focus on matters that the software focused licenses leave implicit or simply consider an irrelevant detail to be worked out by what people can actually manage to succeed or fail at making money on. The closest analog, perhaps, is the bit in GPL compliance where it applies only if you distribute, not if you use internally. "Commercial/noncommercial" is a sort of much broader extension of that, positing that there is a 'noncommercial' area of culture-as-something-that-people-do that is separate from, and not merely a 'cottage industry' scaled version of the 'commercial' culture-as-something-that-media-industries-do, which is a monetary phenomenon and distinct both in degree and in kind from the noncommercial flavor.
In the context of software, I have to admit that I like the conceptual frameworks of the software-oriented licenses much better. This isn't to say that software cannot be a cultural thing; but most software is tools, complex tools, and it seems both appropriate and pragmatic to think about tools in terms of "How can we get good tools?" and "How can we ensure that our labor in producing tools ends up putting tools in the hands we want them to end up in?" OSS/FOSS licensing is a rather novel technique, born of the peculiar economics of software, for answering these questions; but it's actually a fairly conservative conceptual framework.
If anything, the 'Commercial'/'Noncommercial' framework is much more radical: The implicit assertion that there are areas of cultural output that are simply not amenable to resolution along the lines of market commerce(while certainly supportable, if Team Anthropologist fancies a trip back from the tribal regions to inform us that people who don't even have currency somehow manage to have music...); but it isn't necessarily something that would be a natural fit in ye olde contemporary consumer capitalist economies of the early 21st century... By contrast, CC-sharealike, CC-attribution, and similar are practically analogous to the software-oriented concepts, just written to cover non-software more cleanly, in that they don't posit this commercial/noncommercial distinction; but are more focused on either the GPL-style protection of the downstream user and the upstream developer, or the BSD style protection of attribution without significant interference in the distribution process.
Just sayin'. Open Source is FAR FAR FAR removed from "free culture."
is a rip off of the American band "Beastie Boys" and does irreparable damage to the band by associating it with a New Zealand beer.
The band's lawyers have been notified and this craft brew will be sued into oblivion.
Now that we got that over with... what's the topic of this discussion?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If they didn't want you making money off it (so that they could make more money) then they certainly don't want you out there NOT making money off of it (which would make you much stiffer competition at the unbeatable price point of free).
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
So basically he is doing what people have been doing for eons(sharing how to brew beer), but he has added the secret ingredient, pretentiousness and psuedo-intellectual drivel! Just what I always wanted with my suds.
Monstar L
I like my beer without dogma, thanks.
Non commercial does not qualify as Open Source ("No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor") and not Free either..... so how can a CC NC beer be a Free beer?! //fatal
Free beer, served over a Internet "series of tubes". They could make money by selling information about what and how much you drink to anyone interested.
Like, the police, for example.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"Wean copyright junkies off their all-rights-reserved habit"? Am I the only one who actually felt embarrassed to read this and the next sentence?
Or maybe beer as in free beer beer. It's so difficult.
While the intention of the CC licences may have been to encourage reuse by standardization, I find that in many areas, it's still quite murky.
For one, what's non-commercial? The FAQ doesn't quite say, other than to point you to a survey of what some people think non-commercial means, which is all over the map. If you've got a picture, and you merely reprint it, is that non-commercial? If you have ads on a page? If you're a non-profit? A non-profit selling (selling=dollars) tickets for a concert using an NC picture on a poster? Or is it only "commercial" if you're trying to resell the picture, either individually or on a CD, but mere use is not "commercial"?
It seems that NC actually restricts use to nothing more than school reports. Or would that be "commercial" if you go to a private school? Would use in a report (that you're not selling) be OK within a corporation? In the annual report? In a brochure for customers?
Then there's ND: "No Derivatives" The FAQ is equally muddy there, basically just saying that means no adaptations or modifications. OK, what's that? Can you crop or scale a picture? Or you can, if you're a lawyer?
Now, taking Wikipedia's BY-SA license: Attribution isn't a big deal, but Share Alike is a minefield: What's a derivative work? "Alter, transform, or build upon". If you incorporate portions (or even all) of the Wikipedia article on, say, Canola oil, into your annual report, is the report now CC? Or if you incorporate some or all of a Wiki article on a webpage as background info on your topic? Is the rest of the page, which you wrote, now virally infected with CC-BY-SA?
The two biggest sources of CC material are Flickr and Wikipedia. And, in the matter of a user being able to quickly know how he can use a picture or a Wiki article, he's left absolutely clueless. (Again, other than for school reports.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
But there's no copyright infringement in copying the reciepe. In exactly the same way as a dictionary is copyrightable, despite the facts being uncopyrightable. As long as you don't copy the explanations (unless they too are uncopyrightable, as in de minimis or non-expressive).
Dictionaries, maps, and so on have been "copyrighted" in the same way as this reciepe is copyrighted for years.
I have been a homebrewer for 4+ years - and I have brewed with commercial brewers. I have taken commercially-produced wort (pre-beer) home and fermented it at home. I have gotten the "commercial" recipes for beers and replicated them on my homebrew equipment. All this I have done - and I can guarantee you that you will never replicate a beer. You could get close...but to say that "open source" beer gives you the same beer they produce is just not true. If you are going to make beer - there are tons of reasonable free places to get good recipes meant for homebrewers. "Pope" Jamil Zainasheff is a great resource to start with for simple, proven recipes.
The reason why you can't just replicate a beer is simple: *everything* matters. Variables that aren't related to a "recipe" include (from memory): water chemistry, mash temperature, mash duration, sparge temperature, sparge method, sparge rate, boiling rate, hopping method, cooling method, yeast pitching rate, fermentation temperature, fermentation length, fermentation vessel, filtering method, bottling/kegging conditioning method. Some of these are equipment dependent - but some are also *their* equipment dependent - and how they use their equipment as well!
The fact that Budweiser can come across as Budweiser from all of its production plants year after year is nothing short of a *very* involved and active brew-master. Despite its poor reputation in the beer community - they really are good at their job...of producing a yellow-ish, slightly malty, slightly hoppy, corn-flavored beer.
Just release it into the public domain and be done with it.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
That every story concerning Open Source anything:
A: has to contain some silly stunt product as a representative of a bigger realm/idea/market? (Open Source beer? Give me a break, it's freaking stunt.)
B: has to use B.S. metaphors to get it's ideas across while making Open Source seem bad concerning it's image?
Seriously...this is neutral journalism? "the Non Commercial license is either the methadone that can wean copyright junkies off their all-rights-reserved habit, or it is a gateway drug to the psychedelic and dangerously addictive world of open source and free culture."
^That is utter horseshit, period. Never-mind that there is no such thing as a gateway drug, not scientifically at least. The whole idea that it's linked to addiction in this manner is completely offensive, and I will say it now...Sam Muirhead is an asshat.
It's getting decent ingredients and buying proper equipment and spending enough time that makes the end product work.
I'm more of a cider man, and the recipe there's even simpler: chuck a ton of rotten apples in a barrel, add a couple of rats, then strain off the liquid when it starts bubbling. Something like that anyway.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Who needs shitty open source zealot recipes when there's homebrewtalk.com?
Brewing beer at home has been around for millenia. Sharing of recipes online is huge within the homebrewing community. What good is an "open-source" beer? A recipe cannot be copyrighted. The brew itself cannot be patented. The only thing they're doing is sharing the recipe, along with a sample of the beer. Big deal. Many microbreweries share recipes for their brews on their own web sites. Saying the beer is "open-source" simply means you look like a pretentious douche by calling it "open-source".
Bite my shiny metal ass!
Yeastie Boys have now added a license note to their recipe page - you can brew and sell Digital IPA as Digital IPA under the CC- Attribution-Sharealike license: http://yeastieboys.posterous.com/private/yCmgJxeHrs Cheers!