[Oer-community] Article on the inclusion of proprietary licenses in CC 4.0

Kẏra kxra at riseup.net
Mon Dec 3 16:44:52 MST 2012


That blog post did not deal with the crux of the issue. It may help to look
at deconstructions of the popular defences of proprietary licenses in
Creative Commons here:
http://questioncopyright.org/future_of_creative_commons

CC's blog post says <<At the same time, CC celebrates successful adoption
of the NC and ND licenses, in part because those licenses signal a desire
to be more open than the alternative of “all rights reserved.”>>

The response to that claim on QuestionCopyright.org:

<<The NC-and-ND-clauses-are-useful argument:

   - "They serve a purpose even though they aren't free"
   - "A vague protection is better than nothing"
   - "These protect us from big media stealing our work"
   - "Not everyone wants to use a free culture license"

These arguments all seem to be built around the popular discontent with
today's draconian copyright regime, yet they are at the same time
apologetic towards the permission culture which enables it. While NC and ND
appear to empower creators to retain control over their work, it is crucial
to remember what copyright is: a legal construct of private property and,
more specifically, a monopoly. Distributing these innumerable
government-granted monopolies, even to individuals, only leads to
monopolistic organizations that amass ownership and control over huge sums
of our culture. Again, Creative Commons could have provided a totally
customizable framework for rightsholders to pick what rights to grant for
each of their works, but copyright already gives them that power. Making it
easier to do only validates the fears that made copyright what it is today.
Take, for example, the Free Software Foundation. If they had advocated for
any proprietary software/licenses that were anything "better" than the
terms that Windows and OS X are distributed under, the world would not be
as open to the idea of free software as it is today.

These three types of arguments exclude those that have been made purely
concerned with the interests of rightsholders and the many many interesting
and creative misunderstandings of the license terms and enforceability.
This all serves to indicate that Creative Commons' current strategy is
working against all of the great work they do promoting a freer culture.
People don't need to be convinced that copyright is a broken system.
Instead, Creative Commons should be focusing on affecting what people
believe is an acceptable position, showing the world that much more is
possible, and proving that we can and are building a free culture.>>



On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Cable Green <cable at
creativecommons.org
<https://deimos.cs.athabascau.ca/mailman/listinfo/oer-community>>wrote:

CC Blog post (29 August) on this
topic:http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33874
>
> Cable
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 8:55 AM, Seth Woodworth <seth at laptop.org <https://deimos.cs.athabascau.ca/mailman/listinfo/oer-community>> wrote:
>
> >**>* http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-licenses-in-creative-commons-4-0/*>**>* This section in particular is relevant to our conversation*>**>* -----*>**>*   The two proprietary clauses remaining in the CC license set are*>* NonCommercial <http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC> (NC) and*>* NoDerivatives<http://robmyers.org/2010/02/21/why_nd_is_neither_necessary_nor_sufficient_to_prevent_misrepresentation/>*>*  (ND), and it is time Creative Commons stopped supporting them, too.*>* Neither of them provide better protection against misappropriation than*>* free culture licenses. The ND clause survives on the idea that*>* rightsholders would not otherwise be able protect their reputation or*>* preserve the integrity of their work, but all these fears about allowing*>* derivatives <https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26549> are either*>* permitted by fair use anyway or already protected by free licenses. The NC*>* clause is vague <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-9823336-61.html> and*>* survives entirely on two even more misinformed ideas. First is*>* rightsholders’ fear of giving up their copy monopolies on commercial use,*>* but what would be considered commercial use is necessarily ambiguous. Is*>* distributing the file on a website which profits from ads a commercial use?*>*  Where is the line drawn<http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2005-April/002215.html>*>*  between commercial and non-commercial use? In the end, it really isn’t.*>* It does not increase the potential profit from work and it does not provide*>* any better protection than than Copyleft does (using the ShareAlike clause*>* on its own, which is a free culture license).*>**>* The second idea is the misconception that NC is anti-property or*>* anti-privatization. This comes from the name NonCommercial which implies a*>* Good Thing (non-profit), but it’s function is counter-intuitive and*>* completely antithetical to free culture (it retains a commercial monopoly<http://robmyers.org/2008/02/24/noncommercial-sharealike-is-not-copyleft/> on*>* the work). That is what it comes down to. The NC clause is actually the*>* closest to traditional “all rights reserved” copyright because it treats*>* creative and intellectual expressions as private property. Maintaining*>* commercial monopolies on cultural works only enables middlemen to continue*>* enforcing outdated business models and the restrictions they depend on. We*>* can only evolve beyond that if we abandon commercial monopolies,*>* eliminating the possibility of middlemen amassing control over vast pools*>* of our culture.*>**>* Most importantly, though, is that both clauses do not actually contribute*>* to a shared commons. They oppose it. The fact that the ND clause prevents*>* cultural participants from building upon works<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110704/15235514961/shouldnt-free-mean-same-thing-whether-followed-culture-software.shtml> should*>* be a clear reason to eliminate it from the Creative Commons license set.*>* The ND clause is already the least popular, and discouraging remixing is*>* obviously contrary to a free culture. The NonCommercial clause, on the*>* other hand, is even more problematic because it is not so obvious in its*>* proprietary nature. While it has always been a popular clause, it’s use has*>* been in slow and steady decline.*>**>* Practically, the NC clause only functions to cause problems for*>* collaborative and remixed projects. It prevents them from being able to*>* fund themselves and locks them into a proprietary license forever. For*>* example, if Wikipedia were under a NC license, it would be impossible to*>* sell printed or CD copies of Wikipedia<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing/Justifications> and*>* reach communities without internet access because every single editor of*>* Wikipedia would need to give permission for their work to be sold. The*>* project would need to survive off of donations (which Wikipedia has proven*>* possible), but this is much more difficult and completely unreasonable for*>* almost all projects, especially for physical copies. Retaining support for*>* NC and ND in CC 4.0 would give them much more weight, making it extremely*>* difficult to retire them later, and continue to feed the fears that nurture*>* a permission culture.*>**>* _______________________________________________*>* Oer-community mailing list*>* Oer-community at athabascau.ca <https://deimos.cs.athabascau.ca/mailman/listinfo/oer-community>*>* https://deimos.cs.athabascau.ca/mailman/listinfo/oer-community*>**>**
>
> --
>
>
> Cable Green, PhD
> Director of Global Learning
> Creative Commonshttp://creativecommons.org/educationhttp://twitter.com/cgreen
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