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

[Kim Tucker]

Would a license along these lines appeal?
http://wikieducator.org/Libre_Puro_License
and best practices:
http://wikieducator.org/Libre_License_Best_Practices

- given the state of copyright law:
http://wikieducator.org/Brief_History_of_Copyright

Kim

On 30 November 2012 17:55, 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 (NC) and NoDerivatives (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 are either permitted by fair use anyway or
> already protected by free licenses. The NC clause is vague 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 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 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 enforcing outdated business models and the restrictions they depend on.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 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 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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