Creative Commons Launches CC+ License 67
A user writes "Creative Commons has this week released their CC+ protocol, which provides a way for authors to allow other people to commercially reuse their work, and give them a pre-negotiated fee or percentage. It makes it easy for people to release the Material under CC-No-Commercial, and then have a way to charge for commercial use if companies are interested."
CC+ is dual licensing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's smart... (Score:3, Informative)
That's not what this is. It could sort of become that, but it is not.
First, CC licenses are not recommended for code. I think the still recommend the GPL for that.
Second, I think this is only for their licenses with NC terms, so it is definitely not akin to Free or Open Source Software.
If they make the same deal for their BY-SA license, that would be closer to what you speak of, but just not recommended for software. I for one, hope they do this with BY-SA.
all the best,
drew
Re:Cookbook like examples please? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm making a documentary that I may as well plug now, www.followingalexiswest.com. (In fact, I'm making this post from LAX, having just returned from on-location filming.)
Now, in any documentary, you typically get about 20-25:1 shooting ratio. What that means is that for every hour of actual documentary, you've filmed about 20-25 hours of raw footage. In my case, much of that is interviews - educational, important interviews.
That would normally end up on the cutting-room floor - but there's so much educational, important information there. Once I get the stuff digitized, I'm taking a copy of all the raw footage and giving it to the New Zealand Film Archive, and uploading it online on Google Video. And I want people to use this raw footage in their own documentary projects - especially if they're students.
But there are still "commercial" uses - indie documentarians like me - who could also use the footage. I don't want them to take it without negotiating a fair price, but I do want to let them know that it's within the realm of possibility to licence the footage without breaking the bank.
Now, I could release it under a CC licence and sell it to commercial interests, but a CC+ licence makes it explicit that I'm looking to make money - but if you just want to muck around with it for a student project, you'll get no hassle.
Re:That's smart... (Score:4, Informative)
Any license that does not grant free redistribution (not free as in beer, free as in freedom---as in that the re-distributor is free to charge money for the service, if someone would pay) is definitely not free, and most likely not open source.
I don't know why people get these wrong impressions that "free software" == "anti-commercial", but nothing could be further from the truth. Free software is just about as Laissez-Faire, free, capitalistic economic system as you can possibly get (free from government-granted monopolies, etc.). Licenses that "play nice" with communities by "graciously" granting non-commercial uses is definitely better than completely proprietary licenses (or a lack of one), but it's only halfway there since any such license still restricts your freedom in ways that are not acceptable.
If you aren't totally convinced still why these "non-commercial only" licenses are wrong, here's a very simple reason why: Those licenses are GPL-incompatible, since GPL does not allow addition of restrictions with small exceptions, and any project or software using those restrictive licenses is excluding a lot of code out there that is already released under GPL.
Re:That's smart... (Score:2, Informative)
Qt is dual licensed. It's not a modified version of the GPL. It is free software, because it's GPL. In fact, it's, in a way, freer than GPL software, because you can use it in non-GPL projects.
(And of course I'm only using Qt as an example. I'm sure there are other similarly-licensed products.)