Matthew Hodgson wrote: > It's probably only out of fear of security that people think they need > the CC licence.
I don't get this. The first issue seems to be that CC licensing is too complicated. I don't get this. What's so complicated about it? That there are different CC licenses? The reason is that they are trying to solve different problems. Sometimes you want a free license for non-commerical use, sometimes you want a share-alike license, sometimes you want a BSD-like attribution-only license.... They still don't span the space of what's possible, but give a range of options. But what's complicated about any given license? There are just choices. It's only complicated if you want to do something that none of the licenses support (e.g. Ryan's example with mixing "product identity" and open content -- although I must say that myself, that mixture strikes me as more complicated and pitfall-prone than anything CC has put out). The second question is: what do CC licencenses let you do that standard copyright doesn't? To me, it's blatantly obvious what it does, and I'm surprisd that the question even comes up on the OGF list, given that you'd expect this list to have a predisposition to understanding the value of open licensing. For instance: consider a non-commercial license. What's the point? The point is that you can post the text of a book, or chapters from the book remixed with your own stuff, on your website without fear of takedown lawyergrams. A nice thing to have, that. We are CONSTANTLY reminded on sites about copyright that money has nothing to do with it, and thus there *is* a need for a license that allows non-commercial redistribution if that's what you want. A share-alike commercial redistribution license makes it the text equivalent of the GPL for software. Standard copyright law doesn't allow for this. The notion that "you could always just ask for permission" is tremendously naive. Look at all the stories recently about how it is becoming impossible to make a documentary, because you have to get permission to include little bits of culture in the background of your documentary. Yes, the real problem is that copyright law is amazingly, amazingly broken in this country. I, however, have little hope that it will be fixed; indeed, the move with lawmakers seems to be to make it more broken. Given that, the best we can do is try to put our own stuff out under humane licenses. *That* is the purpose of creative commons. -Rob -- --Prof. Robert Knop Department of Physics & Astronomy, Vanderbilt University [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
