On Jun 15, 2006, at 11:50 AM, august wrote:
Interestingly some other people put it into words: http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Freedoms-Standard-Advanced http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/entry-20050920.html
The problem is that we tend to believe that CC licenses are either
all good or all bad. A licence is not a trademark. CC is not a license, its an experimental legal framework to challenge the traditional
conception of copyright. The GPL is endorsed by CC, but the FSF is pissed off
because the CC is not an ideological movement, it's a place where lawyers and the general public can have some fun, together. The CC initiative is
fine, as long as we take the time to understand their (easy) licenses.I think a greater problem is that we tend to think of GPL and CC as being similar things, when in fact they are quite different.
But, I'm not so sure the CC is not an ideological movement. It's just that it's not as totalitarian as the FLOSS/GPL movement.
CC addresses the production of culture, the GPL address the production of code. They are two very different intentions, two very different "things".
And, despite being a FLOSS advocate and avid FLOSS programmer since
many years, I take particular offense to this article:http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Freedoms-Standard-Advanced
Mako Hill only wishes to extend the naive tautology of the word
"freedom", and knock CC for not having an ideology that is as simple and total as
the GPL.
People talk of freedom and its hard to make concrete but there are
real, concrete effects. Lawrence Lessig is definitely a lawyer and
lawyers usually believe that the law works. But few lawyers realize
that the law is really, really expensive. Richard Stallman is a
hacker and was looking for something that actually works. Therefore
the GNU GPL uses the law get rid of as much of the law as possible.
For example, you put your song out with a Non-Commercial CC license,
then some big company uses it anyway. Are you going to pay 1-2
months of your salary to enforce the license and make that
corporation stop using your song? That's the reality. Here's an
example:
http://unraveled.com/archives/2004/05/enforcing_the_creative_commons
CC won't help you enforce your license:
http://creativecommons.org/ faq#Will_Creative_Commons_help_me_enforce_my_license?
The FSF regularly helps enforce against GNU GPL violations. The core
idea is that the GNU GPL allows you to share your code yet be
guaranteed to always have control over it, and to benefit from other
people's improvements to your code. The CC licenses have a bunch of
clauses that sound good, but unless you are going to fork over a lot
of money, they are not enforceable.
.hc
Computer science is no more related to the computer than astronomy is
related to the telescope. -Edsger Dykstra