Timothy Vollmer <[email protected]> writes:
>Hi SFC:
>
>There's been some good discussion on the CC-community email list, and
>FYI we also published a blog post today asking for broader feedback on
>this issue.
>http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/35773
Great post. Thanks for letting us know, Timothy.
By the way, I tried a couple of times to leave a comment there. At
first I thought it was just waiting in a moderation queue, but other
comments have appeared since then, so I'm not sure what happened to it
(I did the recaptcha with no problems as far as I know). This was the
comment:
Name: Karl Fogel
Email: kfogel {_AT_} questioncopyright.org
Website: http://questioncopyright.org/
Comment: (long; below)
Before addressing Stephen's comment, I'd like to say it's great to see Creative
Commons engaging this issue so seriously, and the proposed actions seem very
constructive (especially the rebranding of NC as "Commercial Rights Reserved").
A blog comment probably isn't the place to address all the pros and cons of
the non-free licenses, so I won't do so here, but CC's own <a
href="http://wiki.creativecommons.org/NC_ND_discussion"; >summary</a> in the CC
wiki lays out the issues very well.
Stephen, I think your definition of freedom is idiosyncratic and would not be
recognized by most people who use and distributed CC resources, even under the
non-free (meaning -NC and/or -ND) licenses. It's simply not true that NC
license guarantee the material will be accessible without
cost — even if monetary cost were the only important component
of freedom, which it's not. When material is licensed in a way that allows
commercial use without permission having to be asked first, all sorts of
possibilities open up!
Take translation, for example:
I wrote a book that was published under CC-BY-SA, and it has had subsidized
translations made <em>and was then published and sold</em> in some EU markets.
It is unlikely the organizations that funded this work would have done so if
they had not had a clear license requiring no negotiation (in part because the
resultant derivative works themselves could not have been freely licensed if
the original were not). The overhead of rights negotiation is a <a
href="http://questioncopyright.org/translations_a_tale_of_two_authors"; >serious
obstacle</a> to unanticipated, permission-free sharing and derivation that has
commercial aspects — and much real-world activity inevitably
has commercial aspects.
This is not necessarily an argument that the non-free licenses should not be
available. My point is that the two halves of your last sentence do not go
together: <em>"It should be retained, and promoted as equally open and equally
free."</em>. Maybe the non-free licenses should be retained... But they are
not equally open and equally free when compared with the truly free licenses,
and CC is absolutely right not to promote them as such.
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