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CREATIVE_COMMONS

                                                   November 28, 2011
                                                   (based on earlier stuff)

I have some complaints about
Lawrence Lessig's well-intentioned
"Creative Commons" licenses:

  o there are too many of them.  Lessig
    was apparently agnostic on a number      ALLEN_WRENCH_SYNDROME
    of issues, and choose to let people
    mix-and-match they're own licenses
    to suit "their needs".

  Consequently, people who haven't
  thought very deeply about it
  consistently place tighter          Every blurry little
  restrictions on things than         snapshot gets a "no       I submit that
  makes any sense.                    commercial use"           if there had
                                      restriction slapped       been as many
                                      on it.                    GPLs as there
                                                                are CCs,
                                      DJ mixes of other         Torvalds
                                      people's material         would've
                                      get "no derivative        picked the
                                      works" restrictions.      wrong one.

                                                                (And now that
                                                                he has a choice
                                                                of GPL v3 and
                                                                v2, I suspect
                                                                he is picking
                                                                the wrong one.)

   o Some of the concepts
     involved strike me as
     astoundingly vauge,
     e.g. I'm not really          If you charge enough    I pay my ISP for
     sure what the                to cover the copying    internet access--
     boundaries of                costs of your little    are they allowed
     "commercial use" are.        zine, does that make    to show me "non-
                                  it commercial?          commercial use"
                                                          work?

                                       Consider the fact that the
                                       GPL is not a non-commercial
                                       license.  If it made any
                                       sense to go that route at
                                       all, don't you think Richard
                                       Stallman would've done it?



  o I used to have a complaint that there's
    no obvious way to use CC if you want
    something like "public domain"--
    what if you want to set
    all the restrictions to zero?

      But I think Lessig's successors
      at CC got over the "public domain"          There's apparently some
      phobia, and provided an easy way            legal fuzziness about the
      to go that route.                           idea of "public domain"
                                                  that most of us don't
                                                  care about.

                                                    I gather it's not
                                                    suitable as a software
                                                    license, but can never
                                                    remember why.


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