I can probably agree that most software has a higher discount rate than most non-software, but that changes the optimal length of time until release, not whether to use timed release or not. Ghostscript GPL versions were in fact released after what for culture would be considered a very brief window -- about a year. I couldn't find a timeline of Id releases, but considering the company started in the early 90s and IIRC GPL'd some stuff (I'm no gamer -- Doom?) in the late 90s, probably no more than 5 years.
I find it highly likely the easy availability of timed release would cause some authors who would have released immediately under a public license or into the public domain to use the timed release instead. Consider the simplest case, where one could choose a time delay from the CC license chooser. I bet many people would select it just because they could, just as well over half of people select the NonCommercial option, even though in many cases doing so is counter to what one would hope sharing to accomplish. One could attempt to segregate people one suspects would only free their works if they could do so in a time-delayed manner, but I don't know how one would do that well. Seems like something that should be studied in an experimental econ lab.
Maybe technically the way to do this is through a portal, a CC site or a search engine which only returns free-for-all content. But the non-free content needs to be kept out of the results so it doesn't get in the way.
This is precisely why CC has put such effort into making licenses and licensed works machine readable, ie, with metadata that enables such search that only gives you results with the freedoms you request.
Implementations are far from perfect, but you can go to the advanced search pages at Google, Yahoo, Flickr, and elsewhere -- some available via http://search.creativecommons.org/ -- and say that you want results that can be used commercially and for derivatives. That's a start toward what you want, and one has to start somewhere.
I agree with everything you say above. But you miss my point. Ignoring copyright is not going to lead to no patents, the absence of copyright, or a generally looser intellectual protectionism regime. The idea that ignoring copyright will lead to positive reform or revolution is the dangerous daydream.
1) presumably with a statement saying the license itself becomes effective on some date, ie why bake it into the license? But as I said, IANAL
2) Sure, there's always a tradeoff, and it's just a question of how much complexity is warranted.
3) Yes, software is different. But in what manner is it different that time release would be significant and positive for non-software when it hasn't been for software?
4) Analysis applies to anything, simple economics.
Value of commons not necessary increased by a new option due to substitution. Time release would only increase value (and again, big question of whether it would do so significantly) if time release option primarily pulled in works that would not have otherwise been freely licensed. If it primarily was used on works that otherwise would've been licensed immediately, it is a big negative.
No, I don't assume there's only one culture. If "resistance to copyright" means blithely ignoring copyright and copying Hollywood movies gratis (great, give them free advertising and cultural lock-in) in hope that somehow enforcement won't follow, that is as I said, a dangerous daydream. On the other hand, if resistance means encouraging alternatives to the copyright industries, why not actively renounce copyright so that those who live where it is enforced can cooperate with you and so you aren't screwed when enforcement does start?
I see that you do indeed explicitly put at least some of your work in the public domain, which is great. So this is not a criticism of what you actually do, but the argument you're making.
If the people who did care about the damage being done by copyright (eg Stallman) waited for a revolution instead of acting, indeed, FLOSS as we know it wouldn't exist. Linus would've written code, as would've many others, but there would have been no structure for them to successfully collaborate in. It would have been an instance of failed sharing, even if they weren't conscious of it.
Hi, I work for Creative Commons (and occasionally get sucked into responding to/. comment threads...) --
We soft launched CC0 recently, and will be doing a hard launch in a couple weeks. If you want to know more, I urge you to check out http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0
Here's a copy of the page for easy reading. Please mod this up.:-)
About CC0 -- "No RightsReserved"
This tool is at 1.0 and is ready for adoption. If you would like to participate in a formal announcement, please contact legal@creativecommons.org.
CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright.
In contrast to CC's licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether - the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators - the "no rights reserved" alternative to our licenses.
The Problem
Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright term expires. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about contributing a work to the public domain.
A Solution
CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not ported to any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses. And while this means that CC0 may not be completely effective at relinquishing all copyright interests in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright systems around the world.
Using CC0
Unlike the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, CC0 should not be used to mark works already in the public domain. However, it can be used to waive copyright or database rights to the extent you may have these rights in your work. In addition, you should only apply CC0 to a work if you own all relevant copyright or database rights in it, or have the necessary rights to apply CC0 to another person's work.
There might be legally technical problems (but IANAL) but more significantly, 1) it isn't clear such would need to be built into the licenses 2) added complexity is inherently bad 3) take as a lesson the near total lack of such practice in free software -- the only significant instance I know of, Aladdin Ghostscript, ended the practice approaching 3 years ago, now going straight to GPL and 4) licensing work n years in the future just isn't that valuable (consider discounted present value) -- same analysis showing that even non-retroactive copyright extension doesn't increase incentive shows that timed-release doesn't increase value of the commons much.
Go for it. In the meantime, consider that if over the past 25 years instead of releasing free software, hackers had just waited for "someone to bring sanity to copyright"... we'd be figuring out the best way to download Windows binaries without paying instead of having a vibrant FLOSS economy that outcompetes proprietary software in many ways. We have the same choice to make with culture now. Pegging hopes on copyright reform (when all such has been in the wrong direction for many decades) is a dangerous daydream.
Not at all. Kopimi is just a symbol. Is it a legal instrument? Who knows. And it only suggests that you "want to be copied" -- nothing about adaptations. See if works under "kopimi" are accepted at Wikimedia Commons.
Nothing wrong with BSD (or MIT), though if you want a permissive license it makes some sense to use a modern one that includes some protection from patents, like Apache2. Bruce Perens explained on a recent/.'d post.
Just because giving credit is generally worthy doesn't mean it should be legally mandated in all situations. Nor do legal mandates magically prevent the scenario painted above. Nor does not legally mandating credit disallow you from claiming credit for your work. And copying without credit is not always bad in a straightforward manner. Check out some of the articles linked at http://techdirt.com/search.php?q=plagiarism for some explorations of pluses and minuses. And of course you don't have to use the instrument if you don't want to.
In theory, you may be right. In practice, we can test your theory. Are there no programmers in Poland releasing code under the GPL? There are. Public copyright licenses (and waivers) turn out to be useful tools for releasing work and building community even if in theory they can't work.
If too many people had taken that attitude over the past 25 years we'd be figuring out the best way to download Windows binaries without paying instead of having a vibrant FLOSS economy that outcompetes proprietary software in many ways. We have the same choice to make with culture now. Imagining that suddenly things will change and copyright will then disappear or be reformed (in a positive direction) is a dangerous daydream.
So, after 10 years, has anyone proven that the GPL works?
Unclear what would constitute proof. The anecdotes are fairly compelling. Personally I'd like to see econ lab experiments testing how various levels of copyleft strength work, but I don't have any brilliant ideas for what the experiments should consist of.
The unequal status exists only for the original work, except in cases of assignment. Modified works with many contributors under a NC license -- indeed, nobody can ever profit (modulo fair use of course:)). At least for works with many contributors, NC creates a commercial anticommons. It's possible this is more damaging for software than non-software, at least partially explaining why noncommercial licensing is essentially nonexistent for software. See slides 15-27 of http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/how-far-behind-free-software-is-free-culture-presentation for some handwaving on this.
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Content_License is/was a copyleft license, incompatible with both the FDL and CC-BY-SA, hence is a really bad idea for use with new works (but kudos for using it long before alternatives existed). The author has long recommended using one of the CC licenses instead.
Creative COMMONS deprecated its two almost never used licenses which did not permit at least global noncommercial verbatim distribution, see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7520
Incompatible licenses within the CC suite is of course a valid criticism. For those who get the requirements of the OSD/free software, the solution is to stick to using CC-BY and CC-BY-SA, which CC calls out with approved for free cultural works branding.
Should exim be released under the AGPL rather than the GPL? I don't think it should, because it would place too much of a burden on users of the software without any real benefit to the open source and free software communities.
It wouldn't place a burden on most users, who don't modify the source, so aren't required to provide it. See section 13 of http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html though IANAL...
MTAs perhaps should not be AGPLd, but in general I'd see the pain of making network service source available a challenge that could lead to good things. It would be cool if service deployment made it natural to expose source of the running application. I speculate that deployment from a DVCS will be a winner for such purposes.
My understanding is that this is one or the other, but not both simultaneously. That is, you can have a GFDL edition with only GFDL materials, and a CC-BY-SA edition with only CC-BY-SA materials. But you can't have one edition with both.
The copyright holder can offer any number of nonexclusive licenses. Though intuitively it may seem that a potential licensor can only accept one of the offers, this doesn't seem to be the case in reality, eg see adaptations of dual licensed images on Wikimedia Commons that are also dual licensed and dual- and triple-licensed software projects that remain in that state with multiple contributors and distributors. However, IANAL.
That actually makes a lot of sense. If it has zero commercial value, the NC will never be a problem, because it will only be used in noncommercial works. If you're complaining because you want to use it in a commercial work, then it obviously has commercial value -- he could potentially sell you the rights under a different license....
If it is commercial, you can contact him and make a deal. I imagine he'll be reasonable about licensing it....
Well, again, if NC is a problem, that means obviously I do have something of commercial value to someone. Why is it so wrong for me to want a cut?
You can want a cut, but you won't get one, and your work is less likely to be used as well. The bar isn't potential nonzero commercial value, it's actual commercial value greater than the transaction costs to clear the work.
It appears in http://video.linuxfoundation.org/terms that all content on the site is under the CC Attribution license (use for any purpose, just give credit), which is great. Hopefully we'll see lots of sharing and remixing!
Slashdot Mirror
I find it highly likely the easy availability of timed release would cause some authors who would have released immediately under a public license or into the public domain to use the timed release instead. Consider the simplest case, where one could choose a time delay from the CC license chooser. I bet many people would select it just because they could, just as well over half of people select the NonCommercial option, even though in many cases doing so is counter to what one would hope sharing to accomplish. One could attempt to segregate people one suspects would only free their works if they could do so in a time-delayed manner, but I don't know how one would do that well. Seems like something that should be studied in an experimental econ lab.
This is precisely why CC has put such effort into making licenses and licensed works machine readable, ie, with metadata that enables such search that only gives you results with the freedoms you request.
Implementations are far from perfect, but you can go to the advanced search pages at Google, Yahoo, Flickr, and elsewhere -- some available via http://search.creativecommons.org/ -- and say that you want results that can be used commercially and for derivatives. That's a start toward what you want, and one has to start somewhere.
I agree with everything you say above. But you miss my point. Ignoring copyright is not going to lead to no patents, the absence of copyright, or a generally looser intellectual protectionism regime. The idea that ignoring copyright will lead to positive reform or revolution is the dangerous daydream.
2) Sure, there's always a tradeoff, and it's just a question of how much complexity is warranted.
3) Yes, software is different. But in what manner is it different that time release would be significant and positive for non-software when it hasn't been for software?
4) Analysis applies to anything, simple economics.
Value of commons not necessary increased by a new option due to substitution. Time release would only increase value (and again, big question of whether it would do so significantly) if time release option primarily pulled in works that would not have otherwise been freely licensed. If it primarily was used on works that otherwise would've been licensed immediately, it is a big negative.
Right now, I don't. I didn't say anything about the desire to be free. Please try to explain. Thanks.
I see that you do indeed explicitly put at least some of your work in the public domain, which is great. So this is not a criticism of what you actually do, but the argument you're making.
If the people who did care about the damage being done by copyright (eg Stallman) waited for a revolution instead of acting, indeed, FLOSS as we know it wouldn't exist. Linus would've written code, as would've many others, but there would have been no structure for them to successfully collaborate in. It would have been an instance of failed sharing, even if they weren't conscious of it.
We soft launched CC0 recently, and will be doing a hard launch in a couple weeks. If you want to know more, I urge you to check out http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0
Here's a copy of the page for easy reading. Please mod this up. :-)
About CC0 -- "No RightsReserved"
This tool is at 1.0 and is ready for adoption. If you would like to participate in a formal announcement, please contact legal@creativecommons.org.
CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright.
In contrast to CC's licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether - the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators - the "no rights reserved" alternative to our licenses.
The Problem
Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright term expires. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about contributing a work to the public domain.
A Solution
CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not ported to any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses. And while this means that CC0 may not be completely effective at relinquishing all copyright interests in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright systems around the world.
Using CC0
Unlike the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, CC0 should not be used to mark works already in the public domain. However, it can be used to waive copyright or database rights to the extent you may have these rights in your work. In addition, you should only apply CC0 to a work if you own all relevant copyright or database rights in it, or have the necessary rights to apply CC0 to another person's work.
There might be legally technical problems (but IANAL) but more significantly, 1) it isn't clear such would need to be built into the licenses 2) added complexity is inherently bad 3) take as a lesson the near total lack of such practice in free software -- the only significant instance I know of, Aladdin Ghostscript, ended the practice approaching 3 years ago, now going straight to GPL and 4) licensing work n years in the future just isn't that valuable (consider discounted present value) -- same analysis showing that even non-retroactive copyright extension doesn't increase incentive shows that timed-release doesn't increase value of the commons much.
You can http://creativecommons.org/policies just don't call it a "Creative Commons license"
Go for it. In the meantime, consider that if over the past 25 years instead of releasing free software, hackers had just waited for "someone to bring sanity to copyright" ... we'd be figuring out the best way to download Windows binaries without paying instead of having a vibrant FLOSS economy that outcompetes proprietary software in many ways. We have the same choice to make with culture now. Pegging hopes on copyright reform (when all such has been in the wrong direction for many decades) is a dangerous daydream.
"CC+" is NOT a license.
Not at all. Kopimi is just a symbol. Is it a legal instrument? Who knows. And it only suggests that you "want to be copied" -- nothing about adaptations. See if works under "kopimi" are accepted at Wikimedia Commons.
Nothing wrong with BSD (or MIT), though if you want a permissive license it makes some sense to use a modern one that includes some protection from patents, like Apache2. Bruce Perens explained on a recent /.'d post.
Just because giving credit is generally worthy doesn't mean it should be legally mandated in all situations. Nor do legal mandates magically prevent the scenario painted above. Nor does not legally mandating credit disallow you from claiming credit for your work. And copying without credit is not always bad in a straightforward manner. Check out some of the articles linked at http://techdirt.com/search.php?q=plagiarism for some explorations of pluses and minuses. And of course you don't have to use the instrument if you don't want to.
In theory, you may be right. In practice, we can test your theory. Are there no programmers in Poland releasing code under the GPL? There are. Public copyright licenses (and waivers) turn out to be useful tools for releasing work and building community even if in theory they can't work.
If too many people had taken that attitude over the past 25 years we'd be figuring out the best way to download Windows binaries without paying instead of having a vibrant FLOSS economy that outcompetes proprietary software in many ways. We have the same choice to make with culture now. Imagining that suddenly things will change and copyright will then disappear or be reformed (in a positive direction) is a dangerous daydream.
You shouldn't use CC licenses for software. There are plenty of good licenses for that purpose -- too many. Use Apache2 or *GPL3. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F
Unclear what would constitute proof. The anecdotes are fairly compelling. Personally I'd like to see econ lab experiments testing how various levels of copyleft strength work, but I don't have any brilliant ideas for what the experiments should consist of.
The unequal status exists only for the original work, except in cases of assignment. Modified works with many contributors under a NC license -- indeed, nobody can ever profit (modulo fair use of course :)). At least for works with many contributors, NC creates a commercial anticommons. It's possible this is more damaging for software than non-software, at least partially explaining why noncommercial licensing is essentially nonexistent for software. See slides 15-27 of http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/how-far-behind-free-software-is-free-culture-presentation for some handwaving on this.
Creative COMMONS deprecated its two almost never used licenses which did not permit at least global noncommercial verbatim distribution, see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7520
Incompatible licenses within the CC suite is of course a valid criticism. For those who get the requirements of the OSD/free software, the solution is to stick to using CC-BY and CC-BY-SA, which CC calls out with approved for free cultural works branding.
Disclaimer: I currently work for CC.
It wouldn't place a burden on most users, who don't modify the source, so aren't required to provide it. See section 13 of http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html though IANAL... MTAs perhaps should not be AGPLd, but in general I'd see the pain of making network service source available a challenge that could lead to good things. It would be cool if service deployment made it natural to expose source of the running application. I speculate that deployment from a DVCS will be a winner for such purposes.
It appears slashcode has moved to http://github.com/scc/slash/tree/master
The copyright holder can offer any number of nonexclusive licenses. Though intuitively it may seem that a potential licensor can only accept one of the offers, this doesn't seem to be the case in reality, eg see adaptations of dual licensed images on Wikimedia Commons that are also dual licensed and dual- and triple-licensed software projects that remain in that state with multiple contributors and distributors. However, IANAL.
You can want a cut, but you won't get one, and your work is less likely to be used as well. The bar isn't potential nonzero commercial value, it's actual commercial value greater than the transaction costs to clear the work.
It appears in http://video.linuxfoundation.org/terms that all content on the site is under the CC Attribution license (use for any purpose, just give credit), which is great. Hopefully we'll see lots of sharing and remixing!