On Sunday 09 Oct 2011, Guru गुरु wrote: > CC attribution non commercial allows free distribution for non > commercial purposes. In this specific case, the content is primarily > for educational purposes and there are arguments for keeping > educational resource creation/sharing as a non-commercial activity. > Doubtless you have your reasons to argue why even restricting > commercial use is a restriction and against freedom, but is it not > too extreme a statement to say that the content isn't free?
I understand your concern, and would like to reiterate that when many of us talk about free it's in the context of freedom, and not of cost. Enabling commercial redistribution is one freedom that both the FSF and the OSI agree on as required for a software to be truly open and free. E.g.: From the Open Source Definition: http://www.opensource.org/osd.html > 1. Free Redistribution > > The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away > the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution > containing programs from several different sources. The license > shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale. > > Rationale: By constraining the license to require free > redistribution, we eliminate the temptation to throw away many > long-term gains in order to make a few short-term sales dollars. If > we didn't do this, there would be lots of pressure for cooperators > to defect. > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program > in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict > the program from being used in a business, or from being used for > genetic research. > > Rationale: The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license > traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want > commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it. Agreed that content is not software and identical rules do not apply. However, the principles for defining freedom and openness do not vary between software and content, and the freedom to redistribute and to use for commercial purposes is a necessary quality for either to be termed free/open. No FOSS licence, whether defined by FSF, Debian or OSI, prevents commercial use of the software. Some licences do prevent you from making your work into a proprietary work -- they work to ensure that whatever has been produced as open remains open for perpetuity. In software these licences are termed "copyleft" licences; a prime example of a copyleft licence is the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). Once you release a software under the GPL, no one can make proprietary changes -- any changed versions that are released must be accompanied by the corresponding source code so that others can continue to build upon what has been created so far. For content, the best-known equivalent copyleft licences are the GFDL and CC-SA and its variants. Any work released under these licences may be freely redistributed (commercially or non-commercially) but may not be turned into a proprietary work. So, for example, if you take a 12- minute video training that has been released under CC-SA and add a 3- minute cartoon clip that visually demonstrates the concept being discussed, you are free to then sell the result to me. However, you cannot prevent me from reselling or even freely redistributing your enhanced work, and anyone I pass the work on to has the same rights, privileges and duties. This ensures that the work can never be made proprietary, while still permitting free redistribution in any context (commercial or non-commercial). In any case, the non-commercial clause is terribly ambiguous and mutable, and I'd strongly advocate against its use. To take just a couple of examples, what happens if you aggregate a number of these videos on a CD and offer to send it to anyone for, say, Rs 100 to cover media and shipping costs? That is technically a commercial redistribution and as such verboten under CC-NC. How about if you incorporate 5 works from the site into a 20-day training that you are running commercially? Is the mere aggregation of the content, or is that commercial use, specially if you explicitly provide the CC modules as a free add-on to your core training? In summary, my recommendation is to stay away from NC-type licences that do not provide any clear benefit and needlessly encumber content that could otherwise have a much larger scope. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
