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

[Cable Green]

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> 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.
>
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>


-- 


Cable Green, PhD
Director of Global Learning
Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/education
http://twitter.com/cgreen
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