On Wed, 10 Jan 2007 09:08:48 -0600 Terry Hancock wrote: > Francesco Poli wrote: > >>The CC lawyers are trying to draft a generic, useful and good > >license. > > > > Useful to *whom*? > > Useful to end users and to the community (and hence to the society)? > > Or rather useful to authors that are not willing to grant important > > freedoms to recipients of their works? > > It is important to remember that, without creators, there will be no > works to have such freedoms in the first place. You may not like this > reality, but it is no less true because of that. Is this a good reason to avoid promoting such freedoms among creators? Is this a good reason to drive creators away from good licenses that would make their works DFSG-free? I don't think so. > > Regrettably, many in the Debian project have become committed to the > idea that there is "no difference" between "content" and "code", and > yet this issue has repeatedly demonstrated the falsehood of this > assertion. There are of course differences between programs, documents, musical tracks, movies, images, animations, and so forth. They are different kinds of software, but the differences are not significant enough to grant them different freedom standards. [...] > However, content creators, whose work is not "executed", [...] Let's consider SID tunes. AFAIK, a SID tune basically contains code that is executed by a SID chip emulator in order to play music. Are SID tunes "content" or "executed works"? I would say: both at the same time. There are many examples that show that the boundaries that are supposed to draw distinctions between various categories of software are not clear-cut: they are blurred, with many overlapping cases. I don't think that a line of reasoning which is based on such distinctions can lead to good freedom criteria. [...] > > Drafting and actively promoting licenses that forbid commercial use > > and/or modifications harms the free software movement, rather than > > helping it. > > This is debatable. Certainly NC-licensed works are not themselves > "free" in the same sense that we mean with free software, Jeff Carr argued otherwise in the message[1] that generated this discussion: | That's good, I'm not convinced that CC in any form isn't DFSG. :) | It seems to me the CC is written with the same kind of mentality and | intentions that the DFSG was written. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/01/msg00025.html > but they do > exhibit important freedoms to the people who get them (relative to > commercially-sold proprietary content -- I am all too aware of the > problems they present relative to free works). > > Some argue that this promotes the values of freedom to people who > would otherwise not appreciate the point. People so introduced to the > concept, will have their awareness of free media increased and will > become more interested in truly free works. No, they will adopt CC-by-nc-nd-vX.Y and happily say that their work is in line with the "open source philosophy" (whatever this may mean). Believe me, I've seen this so many times, that I can now consider it a "classic"... :-( Or even worse, they will publish their works stating "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License" without specifying which one and without any link to a suitable URL. Great, "a Creative Commons License" and we do *not* know which one! :-(( [...] > Stallman overstates the case against Creative Commons, in my personal > opinion. Not at all, I think RMS really detected the key difference between the two approaches. I agree with him, for this matter. > > What I do believe Creative Commons has done wrong is to essentially > "pass off" NC licenses as "free" licenses, diluted the "free" brand > image. Recipients of NC works may think that they've already > appreciated the full depth of "free content" and not realize that they > are experiencing a crippled version of it. You say that as if it were a *minor* issue! This is *the* issue: one of the worst things that CC has done and is still doing nowadays. Given the great impact that CC managed to have on people, this is enough to destroy a long time spent by the free software movement to try and educate the public on the meaning and the importance of free software... :-( [...] > These problems are better served not by CC abandoning the NC licenses, > however, but by promoting better "brand differentiation" between NC, > ND, and free licenses. I don't agree, since if one thinks that a license should not be used, he/she should not promote it. > The false unity created by using the label > "Creative Commons License" needs to be eliminated. > > But it also has to be appreciated that CC doesn't want to make moves > like that too quickly, lest they create confusion and disaffection in > their existing community. They produced a *huge* number of different licenses in a relatively limited time frame (thus greatly increasing the license proliferation problem), but they still don't want to correct a problem like this. Quick at causing damages, slow at fixing issues. Yeah, great... :-((( > > > As I already said, forbidding commercial use is definitely *against* > > the spirit of free software and the intent of the DFSG. > > Yes it is. But AFAIK, no one is debating the DFSG-freeness of CC NC or > ND licenses. Jeff Carr was, AFAICS: that's why we are talking about it now... > They are pretty obviously non-free. [...] That's what I think, as well. -- http://frx.netsons.org/progs/scripts/releas-o-meter.html Try our amazing Releas-o-meter! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
Attachment:
pgpAfNmH1D8zq.pgp
Description: PGP signature