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

[Seth Woodworth]

I do agree that the -NC and -ND licenses should remain part of CC4.0, but I
think that the article adequately explain some of the common
misunderstandings and debate around those licenses.

--Seth


On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Cable Green <cable at creativecommons.org>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> 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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