Creative Commons Urged To Drop Non-Free Clauses In CC 4.0 223
TheSilentNumber writes "A member of Students for Free Culture has just published a thorough and detailed post calling for the retirement of the non-free clauses, NoDerivatives (ND) and NonCommercial (NC). They state, 'The NC and ND clauses not only depend on, but also feed misguided notions about their purpose and function.' and that 'Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense.'"
Note that the opinions expressed are of the author alone and not necessarily the entire organization. More info on the process of revising the CC licenses.
Re:What's a derivative work? (Score:3, Informative)
All of this is already well understood within copyright law.
For example, if you have a web page, and you either excerpt or publish a full Wikipedia article, along with your other content, have you just given permission to people to use your content from that webpage?
No.
Is the virality of the CC-SA limited just to the part which you excerpt,
Yes.
or the whole webpage,
No.
or your whole website?
No.
I.e., you include some CC-SA material, and now your entire website is considered a "work", and it's a derivative.
No, it's not.
What if you also have GPL and GFDL stuff in the mix?
No impact.
Which license wins?
Each license applies as it did before you put them on the same site.
If you include CC-SA stuff on a CD, does the entire CD become CC-SA?
No.
Re:What's a derivative work? (Score:5, Informative)
As with any licence, I suppose, it is whatever you label with that licence that it becomes. A single thing (e.g. website, software program, etc.) can include parts that consists of multiple licences, which means the whole 'thing' cannot become one licence, unless altering one of its 'sub' licences does not violate that licence.
On Wikipedia, for instance, the software, i.e. MediaWiki (both server side and the default skins) is GPL, but the content (e.g. text, custom CSS, images, etc.) is CC-SA as you correctly noted. Unless, of course, wherever stated (a lot of images have a variety of licences).
Essentially, no licence wins, because if they cannot be converted to one another, your website has to be released under several licences. However, in general terms, a website appears under one licence, unless noted otherwise. As such, you may wish to include with your Wikipedia excerpt that it is CC-SA content.
I have no idea how much sense this post made, but essentially, it is not uncommon for a multitude of content to have a multitude of licences, even if within the same 'scope'/website/etc.
Re:I'd just call bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
It exists. It's called CC+ .
More information: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCPlus [creativecommons.org]
It's not actively promoted by CC, but if you read that page you'll see exactly how it works.
-- a former software engineer at Creative Commons.