zestyping: Cypherpunks and the Creative Commons.

Ping (

zestyping) wrote,
@ 2004-02-15 19:49:00

Cypherpunks and the Creative Commons.
I discovered recently that some cypherpunks really don't like Larry Lessig's project. This was a surprise to me, because i had been under the impression that everyone thought Larry was cool and supported his work. Not so.

Noise, for instance, thinks Creative Commons does more harm than good. Since i respect her views a lot, we had a long discussion about it (until something like 5:30 in the morning). I live for these kinds of conversations. I learned a lot and i think we were able to pin down some of the ways we differed, and i tried to summarize it all on page of opposing views on Creative Commons.

This is a really interesting issue to me. What do you think? Have a look at the summary and post your opinions here.

Update: this discussion has now been mentioned on Lessig's blog. I'm looking forward to what he has to say.

(Post a new comment)

nibot
2004-02-16 04:37 am UTC (link)

I would be curious to hear about cases where the non-pre-existence of a suitable license held up the release of some IP into a state of public access. It seems, in a sense, that 'license geeks' are often separate from those who are actually generating the content. I think that those who produce content generally look for some easy way to make their content available and aren't too concerned with the exact terms of the license - hence the popularity of 'canned' licenses like BSD, GPL, MIT, etc. But before all these 'internet-era' licenses, small-time content developers had no trouble distributing their works as 'shareware,' 'freeware' or '[in the] public domain' with only a few sentences describing the terms of distribution. In that sense I think that licensing is a cultural thing, where the mode of licensing someone prefers for their own works is related to the dominant modes of licensing.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re:
(Anonymous)
2004-02-18 03:40 pm UTC (link)

It seems, in a sense, that 'license geeks' are often separate from those who are actually generating the content.

This begs a question, in my mind... Has anyone tried copyrighting a license?

-AMusingFool

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: aaronsw 2004-02-22 04:33 am UTC (link)
	All licenses are copyrighted. (Except the few in the public domain, I guess.) Most have restrictions on how you can use them that are substantially different from the restrictions imposed by the license itself. The GPL is a good example (Reply to this) (Parent)

I gotta disagree w/ Noise
(Anonymous)
2004-02-16 05:23 am UTC (link)

As a content generator, I DON'T want to regularly have to write my own licenses. Mostly, I want the Problem to Go Away. Many things that I write fit under Creative Commons; I'm pretty happy to use it.

The fact that it exists frees me to choose it, or not. And it makes it clear to the world that the choice exists--my blog is now CC'd, and so are lots of others. That's cool. It means that my mom can--if she is curious, if she cares--look up more about licensing schemes.

If Noise is right--if the CC scheme is limiting choice--than we should see lots of previous licenses on all sorts of stuff, a wild profusion of voices that was destroyed by Lessig.

Noise should remember that pre-Larry Lessig, the world wasn't a wonderful marketplace filled with a wild profusion of licenses, being tried and tested and creatively modified. Rather, it was The Standard Bono-Disney License ("the owner owns all; don't mess with the owner; don't remix this album 'till we're all dead").

Does Noise really prefer that world?

--
It also occurs to me that in that world, each court case must be tried anew. "Your honor, note that my version of the license more clearly expresses an intent than the one you rules against last Wednesday." In this case, we have a large shared consensus understanding of the licenses--and, actually, courts tend to want to defend consensus understandings when they can. The license consists of the words in it, sure, but it also consists of the social context in which Larry et al wrote it.

-Danyel

(Reply to this)

"I dont want to write it myself"
(Anonymous)
2004-02-16 05:43 am UTC (link)

Here's a question for discussion:

People routinely engage in behaviors such as "employing" house-sitters to water plants and collect mail in exchange for a place to crash or use of the hot tub.

When they do so, they express certain conditions: "Feed the cat twice a day." "Water the lawn once a week." "Don't eat my Cheetos." They also offer incentives: "Here's how the Dish works." "This is the temperature control on the hottub."

I argue that they are in fact "licensing" their house.

It's not a perfect example, but, please explain how this is (or if it isn't why it should be) different from licensing intellectual property.

Undoubtedly, there are canned "Housesitting Agreements" you can download and sign. They probably sound unnecessarily scary, and do not offer the flexibility and intimacy of a homegrown license agreement.

I think if someone told me "I dont want to write instructions for my housesitter, I just want SomeoneElseToDoIt(tm)" I'd laugh at them.

Why is the licensing of intellectual property, then, different from this kind of licensing of real property.

[Please note, I'm not talking about leasing/renting buildings. I'd analogize that to protecting huge corporate IP, such as Disney movies. I'm instead suggesting that "homegrown IP" is a lot like "housesitting".]

-- noise

(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: "I dont want to write it myself"

npcomplete
2004-02-16 01:44 pm UTC (link)

I think there are a lot of differences in practice between a private contract for services/resources (like house-sitting) and a open-ended license for use of information.

You contract with one house-sitter, whom you have the opportunity to vet for suitability. An IP licence is an 'open contract', which (usually) anybody, anywhere in the world, with any motivations, can enter into with you, without your involvement.

As a result, you don't know anything about the licensor of your IP -- they Bob down the street who you could take to small claims court if anything went wrong, or they could be EvilForeignMegacorporation, Inc., with a huge and vicious legal team.

Why is it harder to secure an internet-visible server than a house? Is it because servers are easier to break into? Not really. Default-configured houses, like default-configured servers, are presumably 30-seconds-to-entry with the right tools.

Rather, it's because servers are available all the time to anybody, on an anonymous (or at least hard-to-trace) basis. If anybody in the connected world has means and motivations to crack your server, you're toast. Houses at least have spatial locality, and security-through-being-one-in-a-hundred-million-others-just-like-it (is there an official term for that? herd security?).

Information licenses are tricker because they have unbounded exposure. There are lots of low-probability, really-bad-outcome possibilities, with less possibility for redress.

Perhaps the root issue is that there is no human relationship to act as a check -- most contracts that individual people make work mostly because of human reluctance to be seen as scumbags, or because it's a standardized area of law so that the contract is less relevant (landlord-tenant relations, buying a house or car, etc.). Contracts between potentially-hostile parties are minefields -- think of government contracts and all the things that go wrong.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: "I dont want to write it myself"
(Anonymous)
2004-02-18 03:37 pm UTC (link)

Houses at least have spatial locality, and security-through-being-one-in-a-hundred-million-others-just-like-it (is there an official term for that? herd security?).

That's called security-through-obscurity. :>

(Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: "I dont want to write it myself"
(Anonymous)
2004-02-19 08:08 am UTC (link)

It seems like you're assuming that CC-licenses will only be applied to "home-grown" IP. Why should that be the case? Many very substantial IP producers with wide distribution have chosen CC licenses already.

If all you want to say is that it is overkill for the average person to CC-license every photo they put online from their birthday party that no one, not even those in attendance, would ever care to look at more than twice anyway, then: point taken. But that's not an argument against CC licenses generally.

In lots of contexts they streamline the process on both ends. The artist doesn't have to find and pay a lawyer to achieve her ends, and the end-user can know what they are getting by reading the CC licenses once rather than every individual artist's cooky unique license every time they come across a new work they want to re-use.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	npcomplete 2004-02-16 01:47 pm UTC (link)
	Another reason not to write english-language contracts: because English is a horrible language, legally speaking! I'd be a lot happier if the world standardized on a legal-jargon DSL, and a syntax checker and lint-equivalent for it. Yes, I'm sure that a formal mathematical semantics for general law is a viable goal, it'll happen any day now. ;-) (Reply to this)

anemone
2004-02-16 05:10 pm UTC (link)

My understanding is that the existance of CC licences doesn't actually limit you--an artist can still write his or her own licence if none of the Creative Common ones apply.

To go to your HTML example, WYSIWYG editors are important. My mother-in-law cannot write in raw HTML. Not without a class and serious training. If one wants to forbid her to her generate web pages with a WYSIWYG editor, she won't generate web pages. (She's a wonderful person, by trying to explain anything computerish to her is very difficult.) My mother is slightly better with computers--she could be taught to write in HTML if she had to. But a WYSIWYG editor is something she could figure out on her own, so she doesn't need help to generate a web page. Maybe the HTML from a WYSIWYG editor is bad, but realistically, it's the best you are going to get out of my mother or my mother-in-law.

It's a sort of snobbery to say that anyone can write their own licence and should be required to. Yeah, they are are some people who could possibly be forced by the non-existance of Creative Commons licences to write their own and be better off for it. But there are probably lots of people who would never write their own.

(Reply to this)

promoting the issue...
(Anonymous)
2004-02-17 12:09 am UTC (link)

There's something missing in this discussion... that is, most people don't even realize that they have an option other than big c "(c)". I use Creative Commons licenses for my stuff because it is a way of snowballing a new meme connected to an organization that I think is doing good work and promoting copyright education.

If we can get momentum behind CC and like projects, many people will eventually realize how easy it is to write their own licenses. Also, with a work under a CC license, you can click on the license GIF and/or link and easily see (in a matter of seconds) what rights the author reserves and releases. Once you've seen a few CC licenses you don't even have to click, but just hover over the link to see what is being restricted or granted.

There's a counterpoint to this... that is, not being able to add my own terms to the license restricts my ability to use Creative Commons licenses in some instances. That's too bad. Maybe Creative Commons should have a faster turn-over of new licensing options to reflect such creative licenses as the mix-tape-send-back you mention Ping. Another example is the recent license on the UN's open source study where they wanted anyone quoting the article to have to send them a copy of the manuscript in which the quote was published (regardless if you can actually license this).

Joe
http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb/

PS: that UN study is here: http://www.opensector.org/1075490138 [links to: http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/ecdr2003ch4_en.pdf ]

(Reply to this)

Writing your own license is like writing your own cryptosystem
(Anonymous)
2004-02-17 02:33 am UTC (link)

It seems that Noise is succumbing to the same hubris that dooms most cypherpunk projects. The belief that everyone else is either adept in your problem domain (and therefore really loves the fact that each of your crypto-encapsulating objects lets the user set IV, keysize, and select from a wide-range of functionally useless encryption modes) or else is an idiot for not wanting to spend the time to become such an expert. I would only offer up the simple suggestion that people consider someone who writes their own license the legal equivalent of someone who writes their own crypto algorithm. Yes, they might get lucky and not screw up, but there are lots of ways to screw up and the consequences for this sort of mistake can be much more severe in the legal world...

(Reply to this)

Software licenses
(Anonymous)
2004-02-17 06:06 am UTC (link)

I don't see this as a cypherpunk issue, even if the person you were arguing with happens to be a cypherpunk. I consider myself one, but I'd agree that crafting acceptable licenses is specialized work and anyone who isn't a lawyer shouldn't try it himself.

A better analogy for CC type licenses is software licenses. http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html lists, by my count, 75 alternatives to choose from! Many of them were invented by non-lawyers, and it shows.

(Reply to this)

Writing your own licenses has costs to users

edm
2004-02-17 09:12 am UTC (link)

What seems to be missing from the discussion is that there are costs ("externalities" in economic terms) in everyone writing their own license. Sure they can, assuming they are careful, tailor their license to exactly what they want to permit and on what terms. But now everyone who might use something under the license has to read the license closely to determine what is and isn't permitted and try to decipher any ambiguities. And there are more and more possibilities for conflicting licenses ("oh, I can't use that with that even though I can use each of them individually").

One only needs to look at something like the Darren Reed/IPF and OpenBSD situation, where the IPF license didn't permit modifications, but otherwise looked identical to the standard BSD license. Everyone went merrily on their way treating it like a BSD license for some time until Darren pointed out that modifications weren't allowed, and there was a big dust up. (In the end OpenBSD wrote their own version of the software, called PF, from scratch, and won't touch IPF with a barge pole even though the license has (IIRC) been changed to permit some modification.)

The Creative Commons licenses might be a "cookie cutter" solution to licensing, but at least someone finding something under a Creative Commons license knows what to expect immediately. The same is true for software under the GPL -- it might not always be my preferred choice of license, but if the software is under the GPL I immediately know what the terms are and what it can and can't be used with.

I had some problems with the Creative Commons licenses as they were originally written (provide free guarantees to the world for any liability they incur? No thanks), but those are being sorted out. However even then I was definitely in favour of the simplicity of a fixed set of licenses where one could immediately tell what the terms were and what could be used with what.

If there's some specific things that the CC licenses are missing then perhaps there should be more variations on them. But "solving" the problem of missing combinations by everyone writing their own variations on variations is a recipe for less reuse, and more money in lawyer's pockets figuring it out. Everyone loses, except perhaps the lawyers.

Ewen

(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Writing your own licenses has costs to users
(Anonymous)
2004-02-18 02:25 pm UTC (link)

excellent point and agreed!

The practical consequences of a world in which every person can write his own license would lead toward one of two directions

1. People would regularly ignore terms/infringe and society would have to develop a tolerance for unintentional infringement of this sort.

or

2. You would have the equivalent of tight lock down if there was no tolerance of unintentional infringement. The cost and nuisance of compliance would have a similar effect to that of rigid maximalist copyright control.

Avoiding standardization in the law will only enrich lawyers and strengthen endless legal game playing. Increasing costs and inefficiency only reinforces the agenda of maximalists.
In accepting the idea that copyright is primarily intended to maximize the control of the creator, rather than the traditional view that copyright is a MEANS to an end (namely, to promote the progress of science and useful arts) the author has accepted the logic behind recent perversions of copyright law.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	On warranties lbukys 2004-02-17 02:47 pm UTC (link)
	I think any discussion of the merits of the Creative Commons licenses should include the issue of warranties; see the CC weblog discussion on warranties. (Reply to this)

dissonance of message
(Anonymous)
2004-02-17 10:36 pm UTC (link)

Personally, I've really tried to like the Creative Commons project.
For some years, I've wondered about how to do free non-commerical
licensing of software, while retaining rights to commercial use. So
about every six months since it's been up, I read through the site and
have the same negative reaction. It's not that I disagree with the
licenses and would never use one, but that something just seems wrong.

I think "dissonance of message" is the initial cause of my reaction,
both at the surface presentation level and the underlying philosophy
level.

On the surface, we have a fluffy cartoon guide to what we are told is
a complex legal matter. We have a slick-spoken group of lawyers
saying, "Trust us, we're just here to help". We have inspirational
messages about changing the future of world, and examples showing how
to do this by creating our own mix tapes of techno music.

Going deeper, there is a philosophy of generosity backed by an
extremely defensive legal stance. We are presented with a myriad of
bulletproof license options allowing us to post our vacation photos
online securely, unlike when we used to just share them with friends
without a second thought. One almost eagerly awaits an infringement
just to be able to sue someone for misappropriating your gift to
society.

(OK, that last one is an exaggeration, but I bet there are quite a few
people who would like to see this license tested in court)

The GPL definitely comes associated with a worldview. Not everyone
who uses the license shares the view, but it's present:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. By offering a cafeteria
of license styles, CC tries to avoid endorsing any particular
worldview. But while not as explicit, I think think the CC project is
pervaded by a particularly legalistic worldview.

This view encourages one to think of everything one produces as
property, to exercise one's property rights by licensing this property
through well-defined contracts, and to be ready and prepared to defend
these rights by legal means. The view implies that society is
generally improved through greater attention to legal detail, and
specifically, that in the absence of explicit licensing, the societal
potential of the work is lost.

There's probably a lot of truth to this view, but instinctively I
don't think it's a good path to follow. I want to move in the
direction of less litigation, not more. I want personal trust to have
greater value than legal interpretation. I think the comparison
between CC licenses and housesitting is good.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/zestyping/36000.html?thread=132768#t132768

While there probably are legally enforceable housesitting contracts
out there, I don't think they would improve the situation. Making the
relationship more formal may actually work against both parties. A
sense of personal responsibility is lost, replaced by a sense of legal
defensibility. Maybe this is inevitable, but I hope not.

So enough gut-level criticism---what's the solution?

I think that Creative Commons needs to focus more on either commercial
or private use, and give up on trying to cover the full spectrum from
major-label record releases to family vacation photos under one
umbrella. The heavy commercial users already have legal mechanisms in
place, and don't need the cartoon approach. The small private user is
looking for much more lightweight solution, more akin to adding a line
"Copyright 2004, permission required for commercial use".

Personally, I think they could do the most good by focusing on private
users and encouraging them to explicitly allow others greater access
to their work. Instead of trying to convince large producers that
they should license material more freely than they currently do,
concentrate on the people who are already willing to let people use
their work but don't have a way of expressing to others that they are
allowed to do so. Instead of concentrating on bulletproof contracts,
work on reducing people's fear that they will be sued. And make it
all so simple that it can fit in a JPEG, MP3, or HTML comment.

A tall order, surely. But easier than convincing the courts to fix
the current copyright law, right?

--nate

(crossed to http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001741.shtml)

(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: dissonance of message
(Anonymous)
2004-02-18 01:32 am UTC (link)

Nate?

What you are missing, I think, is that this IS a legalistic world. If you put up your vacation pictures without a notice, I cannot touch them. (Or I can, but I have to expect that you may well sue me Just Becaues You Can.) I'm not convinced that having a well-framed contact that happens to be nicely expressible in cartoon figures is more heaviweight than "Copyright 2004, permission required for commercial use".

My Creative Commons license fits in a line of HTML. It would be this:
Some rights reserved. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/)

And I'm impressed by the scalable beauty. Are these your vacation pictures? Cool, we have an answer with simple stick figures. Are you SuperMegaCorp? No problem, our lawyers have a crisp version. Might your vacation pictures be of interest to Sony? No problem, the stick figures have lawyers behind them.

Danyel
http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: dissonance of message
(Anonymous)
2004-02-18 06:50 am UTC (link)

> What you are missing, I think, is that this IS a legalistic
> world. If you put up your vacation pictures without a notice, I
> cannot touch them. (Or I can, but I have to expect that you may well
> sue me Just Because You Can.)

Although I try to avoid it, I am aware that such a legalistic world
exists. On the other hand, that world is not yet universal, and with
luck will not become so. Which is why I think there is still room for
expressing one's intent in a non-contractual fashion. And which is
why a house-sitters contract would be still considered rude and
counterproductive in many parts of the world.

> I'm not convinced that having a well-framed contact that happens to
> be nicely expressible in cartoon figures is more heaviweight than
> "Copyright 2004, permission required for commercial use". My
> Creative Commons license fits in a line of HTML.

To point out, these approaches specify very different things. In my
case, I'm strongly hinting at my intentions but avoiding explicit
legal promise. In your case, you are making some very specific
promises. As a producer, if at all possible, I'd prefer a solution
that would allow me to retain my rights while still allowing others to
make use of my work. While as a consumer I might prefer the explicit
legal promise, in many cases the gesture would be sufficient.

[deleted list of bad hypothetical examples of CC licenses gone awry]

My goal is to have less fear of litigation, and that the presence of
an explicit legal contract tends to increase rather than decrease my
fear. In the same way that some people tend to feel less safe when
surrounded by guards carrying automatic weapons, I tend to feel less
safe when surrounded by complex legal licenses, or worse, smiling
cartoon figures backed by legal threats. While both may actually
improve my safety, the psychological effect is quite different, and my
preference is for a world where they are not necessary.

Mind you, I say these things not because they are actual flaws within
the CC licensing scheme, but perhaps to explain to the CC converts why
some people aren't as excited by the new licenses as they are.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: dissonance of message
(Anonymous)
2004-02-18 08:25 pm UTC (link)

It's a shame that you felt the need to delete the list of bad hypothetical examples... I was curious.

While I understand what you mean, this isn't the difference between "lots of guards have automatic weapons" and "an open plaza," as you suggest. The automatic weapons are already there, and for some of us, they seem to be getting pulled out by other people an awful lot. I think it's too late to talk about demilitarization.

-Danyel

(My god. I had no idea I had this strong a libertarian streak!)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: dissonance of message
(Anonymous)
2004-02-22 02:10 am UTC (link)

Well, the main reason I removed the examples were that they seemed
off-topic and rather preposterous. But they probably do illustrate my
fears, irrational as they may be. But here's couple of them:

My starting point was the license you linked to, a CC non-commercial
license, as applied to some hypothetical photos from your hypothetical
vacation at Disneyland. Presume you post the photos on the web.

1) I take the photo of you, a schoolteacher, photoshop it so that you
appears to be doing something (a. obscene, b. illegal, or c. simply
politically unacceptable), and republish in full compliance with
the terms of the CC license. Your students find it, you demand
that it be removed, but citing the license terms the licensee and
his grinning team of lawyers refuse, and you lose your job.

2) For some ironic reason, I decide to advertise my treasonous,
revolutionary, anti-capitalist cause using the photo that you took
of Mickey Mouse scratching himself. Disney sues me for use of
their copyrighted image, and wins judgement for all my money. I in
turn sue you for all your money under the terms of the CC license's
Section 5, in which you warranted that you had the necessary rights
to license those photos to me under the CC license.

But I think these are off-topic, because my problem isn't really with
the way in which the license could be misused, but with a world that
requires that one think closely about how to license one's vacation
photos. From a legal perspective this might make sense, but from a
social perspective it seems like a disaster. I want to find a
solution that breeds less fear over copyright issues, not more.

> While I understand what you mean, this isn't the difference between
> "lots of guards have automatic weapons" and "an open plaza," as you
> suggest. The automatic weapons are already there, and for some of
> us, they seem to be getting pulled out by other people an awful
> lot. I think it's too late to talk about demilitarization.

Sometimes I fear that you may be right, but I don't think that an arms
race is the right way to fight this battle. Escalation is going to
benefit the side with the best lawyers, and will benefit no one but
those lawyers. Which makes me think that another approach (passive
resistance, pacifism, civil disobedience?) would be a better route to
follow. It is interesting, though, to think about the parallels
between nuclear weapons and IP law, patent thickets versus mutually
assured destruction.

--nate (nate@verse.com)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	Re: dissonance of message dachte 2004-02-18 05:14 pm UTC (link)
	Intellectual Property is like a fishhook. It can lift you someplace new, but it hurts like hell, you'll never be free once you buy into it (agree to abide a license), and you might not've wanted to follow the hook anyhow. (Reply to this) (Parent)

Easy or hard?

zestyping
2004-02-18 01:03 am UTC (link)

As the first table in the summary outlines, Noise and i think it really comes down to one starting assumption: whether it's easy or hard to create and use custom copyright licenses. Everything else follows from that.

Noise says that "in fact, writing basic licenses is basic. ... Copyright law FILLS IN all the hard stuff... Just like when you don't have a will, the law FILLS IN what happens to your stuff. (Please note that Copyright ALSO fills in things like Fair Use, so if you come up with something draconian, people may well be able to ignore your conditions.)"

She's extremely busy right now, but still sounds very interested in participating in this discussion.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Easy or hard?
(Anonymous)
2004-02-18 06:32 am UTC (link)

(sorry about misspellings...)

Does copyright law FILL IN all the basic stuff?... we need to remind ourselves of the difference between licenses (grants of rights) and contracts (i.e., software _agreements_). Contracts have gap-filling, while licenses can literally be anything (I grant you my public performance right of this post as long as you do it standing on your head). This is precisely why most software _agreements_ say "This is the license. Your use of this software is subject to the terms of the following _agreement_." The thought is, the license is one paragraph that includes the rest of the terms and conditions which is a contract that you agree to be bound by (by clicking, browsing or removing shrink-wrap apparently). This is also why you never "click" to agree the GPL... it is touted as a pure license (that is, there is no agreement). The GPL says, the only way you get these rights is by adhering to these conditions or you are void.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Easy or hard? (Anonymous) 2004-02-18 06:33 am UTC (link)
	Damn LiveJournal not letting me be anything but anonymous... :) that last one (and this one) is me. -Joe http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb/ (Reply to this) (Parent)

The risk might be worth it.
(Anonymous)
2004-02-18 02:23 pm UTC (link)

This is a good play of the issue. Seems to me that the arguments opposing CC boil down to two:

You can write your own, so why bother with CC?
You might unintentionally give up some right, so why take the risk?

As to the first argument, if you want to write one, go ahead. Personally I’ve never met anyone with any interest in writing a copyright statement. But suppose we were all to write our own. Would that be a good thing? In my experience, most people are bad writers, painfully so when they try to wax legalistic. Set them about the task of writing a copyright statement based on their armchair-lawyer’s conception of copyright, and anyone who wants to use the content is going to need a real lawyer to sort it out – which will bring us full circle to the need for CC.

As to the second argument, the whole point of CC is to serve the interests of people who want to allow others to use their content. (If you want to reserve all rights to your content, then don’t use a CC license.) The underlying assumption in the argument about accidentally giving up rights is that the value of those unknown rights exceeds the value of allowing other people to use your content. Does it? Even if we set aside the public benefit of encouraging greater creativity through reducing the barriers to use of material, it seems clear that restricting use of your material means restricting potential exposure to your material.

I wonder how many creative individuals would be better served in the long run by greater exposure than by retaining every possible legal right to their work.

--Todd Woofenden, www.poisoningthewell.com

(Reply to this)

A great multi-license failure
(Anonymous)
2004-02-19 11:22 pm UTC (link)

So check out the download license page for CERN COLT:
http://hoschek.home.cern.ch/hoschek/colt/download/v1.0.3/download.htm

This is what happens when a number of different packages all have their own licenses. It's really annoying trying to figure out what's legal with this package... If I want to release something commercially, what can I do? Which modules are ok?

-Danyel
http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	Re: A great multi-license failure (Anonymous) 2004-02-22 01:10 pm UTC (link)
	Kazaa has launched Kapsules and are trying to work on multi-licensing options with Altnet. It's important to remember that there are some things that need the digital industry to really mature before they are ready to blossom. I think Creative Commons is, in some ways, ahead of it's time. Michael Liubinskas Sharman Networks (Reply to this) (Parent)

Why do I sign Pre-Printed Leases?
(Anonymous)
2004-02-20 11:09 pm UTC (link)

For many years, I have rented houses or apartments to live in. I am always asked to sign a lease. Usually, that lease is a pre-printed form. Though I am certain a lawyer had something to do with drawing up a distant prototype, I doubt very much whether a lawyer would recommend the forms I sign for either me or my landlord. In general, they are probably worse for me, and bad for both of us.

Why do I sign? (1) I want to rent that house. (2) I want the landlord to feel secure and happy about me renting the house. (3) I expect the draconian terms will either not be enforceable, or that I will be able to resolve any issues before their wording becomes relevant--I accept the risk. (4) I understand that most people put more faith in the form than the content. Like click-through licenses. Licenses as actually used have nothing to do with Law, and everything to do with the social engineering of Trust, where it wouldn't otherwise exist.

You ask CC vs. do-it-yourself. That is the wrong question. The real question is pre-printed vs. don't do it all. Why make your readers jump through hoops ever? Why not just put everything you write in the public domain? If you are willing to go with the illusion that the GPL or CC license will gain you something, then doubtless you are willing to believe that a pre-printed form can meet your legal needs. Or, perhaps you understand the dynamics of social acceptance, and are willing to gamble that the pre-printed stock form is more acceptable than one you write yourself.

If you tell me your fears, I will tell you why you use your license. Once I know why you license your work at all, then I will tell you what the right answer is. Without that missing information--why bother?--there is no answer to the question you pose.

=John Goodwin=

(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Why do I sign Pre-Printed Leases?
(Anonymous)
2004-02-22 02:30 am UTC (link)

> For many years, I have rented houses or apartments to live in. I am
> always asked to sign a lease.

Whereas I have an apartment that I rent out, and so far I've
successfully avoided making anyone sign anything. I don't think it
benefits me, and I don't like the social effect of having a legal
document replace a social bond. So far it's been working.

> If you are willing to go with the illusion that the GPL or CC
> license will gain you something, then doubtless you are willing to
> believe that a pre-printed form can meet your legal needs.

No, actually I have more faith in the GPL than I do in the widespread use of pre-printed legal forms. I think the goal of the GPL is to make more
software available to the public, and that it's use as a license it does in
fact encourage this.

> Once I know why you license your work at all, then I will tell you
> what the right answer is.

I don't always license my work, but when I do it is because:

1) The license will help encourage others to make their work
available, particularly if I want to make use of that work
(receiving their bug fixes and the like).

2) Much of the work is done on projects already under a GPL style
license, so if I want my changes to be available to others it's
simply easiest to relicense under the same terms (ie, #1 works).

3) My employers have often been able to see that a GPL style license
could be a benefit, while they are more resistant to putting work
that they have paid for directly into the public domain.

These reasons are quite particular to software, though. In most other
cases, I think that a direct dedication to the public domain, or a
non-legally enforceable statement of non-aggression is probably a
better choice ("Copyright 2004, share and share alike").

So what's the right answer?

--nate

(Reply to this) (Parent)

argument is not about the licenses (?)

flipzagging
2004-02-22 09:21 am UTC (link)

Noise does not seem to be objecting to the CC licenses as licenses. If I've understood correctly, s/he is objecting to the CC *brand* drowning out the DIY ethic of making up your own distribution scheme.

I think this is wrong.

It's not CC's role to help people be independent-minded or realize every goal they might have for their creative works. As I understand it, CC is trying to reduce coordination costs among people who might want to share content. So CC licenses are of necessity not particularly creative. ;)

Yes, there is a group of people who a) might, in some possible world, not want to use CC licenses, b) are too lazy to investigate other options if something easy and useful is put in front of them. But I doubt these people would have been innovators anyway.

There are probably even better ways to distribute and license content than we have now. The CC technology can already point to homebrew licenses, so innovate away!

(Reply to this)

a simple Engrish sentence

flipzagging
2004-02-22 09:44 am UTC (link)

It may be factually true that writing copyright licenses is as easy as writing a simple English sentence,

This disqualifies most of the human race, you know?

Centralized standardized licenses, as in the case of CC, reduce the costs of translation. In the long run, that might be even more important than the legal work that went into the licenses. DIY licenses can never compete here.

(Reply to this)

Parametric licenses are very very useful and simplify reality much
(Anonymous)
2004-02-29 06:12 am UTC (link)

Parametric license (http://www.consumerium.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Parametric_license)s, most of them mandatory, are what the entertainment industry uses to ensure that Joe X can't sue a radio station for playing a cover version of a Joe X tune. Despite problems with rights to remix and such, the royalty collection has made it possible for people to for instance make a living as a song writer without also being a lawyer. Parametric contracts are obviously also what commodity markets are built on.

They are a GOOD THING. And Creative Commons is the only game in town for those whose needs aren't quite satisfied by a monolithic one. Gee, don't most useful programs take some command line parameters? Same idea.

One of the key advantages of a parametric regime is that one can characterize the difference between one license and another very neatly, and then can price the difference. So if I release under the nonprofit version of Creative Commons, then I can set a price for for-profit use with all other rights held the same, and it's only that parameter that changes. This can be improved somewhat to make it cheaper to use my work in organic farming and much more expensive to use it in golf course design, if I want, which I do. By focusing only on the differences that matter between different fields of use, or different applications, and not having to focus on side issues and language that presumably is professionally handled already, I gain the freedom to negotiate along lines that I consider meaningful.

Also, if I am cheated or challenged on a license term, and I have used a parametric license, there are lots of other people who don't want that license to be challenged. Therefore I have lots of natural allies, other users of other versions of that license whose use of it may rely on the same terms I'm being challenged on. If it's a consortium license (http://www.consumerium.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Consortium_license), then, there may even be a fund and process already set up to defend me. This is all a lot better than relying on the anti-institutional GPL or GFDL which are often defied, or relying on lawyers I have to hire to defend text that I have to hire them to write, which may well have serious flaws in it that a consortium would have caught on day one.

Noise's comments are just that - noise. Creative Commons is the best thing to happen yet, and when it's got some improved license terms to deal with moral rights, restrictions on military or police state use, and on ecologically destructive uses, it'll be damn near perfect. Meanwhile the GPL users will no doubt be arguing for the rights of Free Anthrax to continue to mutate and improve under the ideologically pure eye of RMS and his Free Zombie Squad, or be sold for profit to Rumsfeld by Halliburton. I'll take Lessig thanks.

(Reply to this)

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