Creative Commons v3.0 Launched

An anonymous reader writes "Creative Commons announced the release of its licenses on Friday 23 Feb 2007. Changes include "Clarifications Negotiated With Debian and MIT", CC-BY-SA "compatibility structure", endorsement control, etc."

Iceweasel

[Yvanhoe]

Does it mean Iceweasel will finally be renamde firefox ? Or am I completly missing something here ?

No.

[tepples]

Does it mean Iceweasel will finally be renamde firefox ?

No. The source code for Firefox software is distributed under the Mozilla Public License and GNU licenses, not a Creative Commons license. Besides, the Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses, and Firefox vs. Iceweasel is a trademark issue, not a copyright issue.

Nope, still not GNU compatible

[tepples]

From the CC-BY 3.0 Legal Code [creativecommons.org]:

4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:
a. [...] If You create an Adaptation, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Adaptation any credit as required by Section 4(b), as requested.

All six primary Creative Commons licenses contain this provision. The GNU copyleft licenses (GNU General Public License and GNU Free Documentation License) do not allow authors to require downstream users to alter or remove credits. Therefore, it appears that the Creative Commons licenses are still incompatible with GNU licenses, and works under a Creative Commons license cannot be used in works under GNU licenses such as GPL computer games and GFDL software manuals. I've explained this in more detail on my user page on Wikimedia Commons [wikimedia.org].

Seeing that GPL get more asshole every revision,

[imsabbel]

i really wonder how anybody would care about being "compatible" with it.

Re:Seeing that GPL get more asshole every revision

[cortana]

People (e.g., Debian) who want to distribute a program that is licensed under the GPL and that uses data files (icons, music, etc) that is licensed under Creative Commons licenses care.

Re:

[lys1123]

So would you be in favor of a license more in line with GNU copyleft ideas, like maybe the Free Artist Community License [pbwiki.com]?

Re:

[Perey]

Well, that is a problem, but overall I'm more concerned with whether they've addressed Debian's criticisms [debian.org]. The GNU criticisms [gnu.org] are basically, 'People refer to them vaguely, and you can't use them with our licenses.' The latter is a considerable practical problem, given the mass of GPL material out there. But the issues raised in the Debian criticism are much more serious, as far as I'm concerned. They deal in detail with its vaguenesses, its difficult points, and essentially with how well it can really be u

Evan Prodromou mentioned my beef

[tepples]

Well, that is a problem, but overall I'm more concerned with whether they've addressed Debian's criticisms [debian.org]

Then they haven't. The issue I mention is described under the header "Removing References" in the Debian page. The change of "reference" to "credit" in 2.5 clarified this somewhat, but the core of the problem remains:

an author who made a novel available under an Attribution 2.0 license could give notice to disallow an annotated version that mentions the author by name or simply as "the author".

why should it be GNU compatible?

[yankpop]

So what? If they were completely compatible then I'd wonder what was the point of making up a new license at all. They don't do the same thing. The GPL is intended for use with software, Creative Commons adapts the idea of copyleft to apply to more traditional publishing.

I think the point is that there are different needs for different sorts of publishing. If you are working on code and its documentation, GPL is the way to go. Probably also a good choice for textbooks. More personalized work, like fiction, opinion pieces, even some technical discussions, need to be protected from unacknowledged alteration, so verbatim copying, or enforced modification of credits is entirely appropriate.

The concept of Free Software as embodied by the GPL does not generalize well beyond the confines of software, at least not without the sorts of modifications provided by Creative Commons licenses.

yp.

Re:

[cortana]

You make a lot of assertions, but you don't back them up. What is the real difference between software code and music/artwork/fiction text?

Re:

[cortana]

Whoops, hit reply too soon. To continue... ... it is the lack of a satisfactory answer to that question that leaves me with the opinion that, even though Debian's stance on the Creative Commons licenses is really annoying, they are right damnit.

Re:

[schon]

Perhaps he felt that the assertions were self-evident. After all, the people who drafted the GPL [fsf.org] felt there was enough of a difference that they drafted the GNU Free Documentation License. [gnu.org]

Re:

[ZachPruckowski]

CC-by-SA and GFDL are very similar licenses, but because you can't combine them, or move content from one of them to the other, they create a divide in the free-content world, since a site under a CC licenses can't take GFDL stuff and vice-versa. This even has negative repercussions for Wikimedia sites - Wikitravel and Wikipedia are under the same stewardship, but can't share content, because they're under different licenses.

Creative Commons == GPL (Sometimes)

[ubuwalker31]

I think the most important development is that the GPL and the LGPL are now official Creative Commons Licenses: http://creativecommons.org/license/cc-gpl?lang=en and http://creativecommons.org/license/cc-lgpl?lang=e n .

I also like the "human readable" version of the licenses which list out the four essential software freedoms in a "deed" format: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/

I think that there are more people who are familiar with the CC licensing system, than with the GPL, so this should re

Re:Creative Commons == GPL (Sometimes) Old news

[jbtule]

This is not new, they've had the summaries and web badges for GPL since 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040416235826/http://c reativecommons.org/license/cc-lgpl?lang=en [archive.org]

Re:

[MarkWatson]

I think that the two licenses are for very different purposes. Personally, I use the GPL for my open source projects and I use CC for my open content writing projects. Sharing software and sharing writing are different, at least for me, so I prefer different licenses.

I want people to be able to modify my software and reuse it as they need to (I also offer more commercial friendly licensing when people ask for it). On the other hand, I don't want people to be able to modify my free web books (except for emai

Software, writing, what is difference?

[tepples]

Sharing software and sharing writing are different, at least for me, so I prefer different licenses.

Is a help file considered software or writing? If a program reads localized user interface messages from a data file using something like gettext [wikipedia.org], is the data file considered software or writing? Nathanael Nerode recommends [rr.com] distributing a program's manual under the same license as the program itself.

On the other hand, I don't want people to be able to modify my free web books (except for emailing me corrections and suggestions) so I choose the appropriate CC license for that.

Then you have the same stance on manuals that Daniel J Bernstein has on software. The same mentality produced the QPL and the Pine license, which have problems listed in their entries on the GNU project's lice [gnu.org]

Re:

[hawaiian717]

I think you assume that the grandparent poster puts the manuals for his GPL'd software under a restrictive CC license. That's not the conclusion I drew reading it. I would agree with you that it makes sense to put documentation under the same license as the software.

Taking a quick look at his site, it looks like the open content books are more along the lines of what you'd find in the computer section of a bookstore. Since these aren't directly tied to an open source software product, I think its perfect

What is the manual

[tepples]

Taking a quick look at his site, it looks like the open content books are more along the lines of what you'd find in the computer section of a bookstore.

A lot of books that I find in the computer section of a Barnes & Noble store describe some computer program. In a sense, they are third-party manuals. In particular, two of Mark Watson's web books are a manual for Sun's J2SE SDK and a manual for Common Lisp. (For this discussion, I'm ignoring the AI book and the fiction.) What happens once a program's maintainer releases a new version of the program with changes that make parts of the book no longer relevant, and the author cannot be contacted? Try u

CC is 'Open Source' not FSF

[Jack Action]

In recent years, Creative Commons has gone in an 'Open Source' direction, far from the principles of the Free Software Foundation that CC founder Lawrence Lessig said inspired his movement in the first place (cue howling anti-RMS Slashdotters).

In fact, in the recent GPLv3 furor, Lessig came down [lessig.org] on the side of Linus Torvalds, against Richard Stallman. This is when I first began questioning the value of supporting CC by using one of their licenses.

It seems, like others in the 'Open Source' movement, CC has mades its compromises and now plays nicely with those who want to make a ton of money off of user generated content (MySpace, Rupert Murdoch anyone?), without necessarily preserving the rights of users.

CC now resides in the ESR category.

Re:

[omeg]

I seriously do not understand exactly what that passage you quoted says. I've read it through a few times, but it's so incredibly soaked in marketing speak that the essence of the information actually seems hidden. "Remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable"?

Correct me if I'm wrong about this. Isn't it so that technically, while it is possible to say that if license A allows for uses B and C, one can use the work in those ways, it is not possible to say that if license A is

Re:

[core_dump_0]

Not unless someone grabs the work, makes a derivative, and then decides to release it under the fully compatible license B.

This is exactly what I'm trying to avoid by not upgrading my works to CC BY-SA 3.0. You never know what CC will approve in the future, so the agreement is dangerous. The GPL is just as dangerous, but the GPL is run by the FSF, who is not likely to give up their extreme left-anarchist viewpoints anytime soon. I trust the FSF more than I trust CC, though automatic license updates of most GPL software and "compatible licenses" for derivatives are both dangerous.

I don't know why my initial comment was moderate

Comments on public domain and noncommercial

[ortholattice]

I am glad to see the have included public domain as a prominent choice. It was there before, but somewhat buried and hard to find - it you used their standard picker, it wouldn't come up at all. I wrote them about this years ago, and (whether in response to my complaint or not) it's good to see they've finally done something about it.

Public domain is a greatly underrated and overlooked choice. It can make life vastly easier for users by not having to worry about tracking credits for every little nitpicking minutiae, but instead depends on commonsense ethics to make acknowledgments where appropriate, without having to worry about violating the fine print of some legal copyright license. For minor stuff where suing would be silly even if someone plagiarized it - from a simple utility icon to this very post you're reading - I think public domain release makes a lot of sense for those willing to do it but who are now simply unaware of the possibility.

On the other hand, they still haven't clarified the fine legal points of exactly what "commercial use" means. As I've posted [slashdot.org] here before, almost anything can be interpreted as "commercial use" if someone is so inclined. IMO almost any use of works under a noncommecial-only license is a risk not worth taking. In addition, they can't be incorporated into GPL software, so for open-source development "noncommercial-only" works are completely worthless.

Re:

[apathy maybe]

If you do care about your work being shared with others, then public domain is not really an option. Because quite simply, anyone can come and take that open work and close it again. The page on GNU philosophy at www.gnu.org has more information about this problem.

Personally, if I am happy with others using my work, I release it under a simple licence that says something like: Use as you like, but then if you do use, it make sure any copies or derivatives are, 1, under this same licence, and 2 that everyb

Re:

[Raenex]

If you do care about your work being shared with others, then public domain is not really an option. Because quite simply, anyone can come and take that open work and close it again.

Public domain is a valid option. Sure somebody can close a derivation of it, but then the open version still remains. There's lots of BSD-style software that succeeds in the open even though closed versions exist. It's up to each author to decide the issues for themselves. LGPL is another option, which can serve as a nic

Re:

[1110110001]

The problem with public domain is it's just not possible in some countries. I.e. in Austria or Germany you can't give up your copyright - or only with you death and 70 additional years. But then it's automatically public domain.

Re:

[Raenex]

I am glad to see the have included public domain as a prominent choice.

I like the public domain choice too, but I find their version [creativecommons.org] way too wordy. Forget the lawyer-ese, I want a license that I can glance and nod my head to. I like this version [ezinearticles.com] (originating from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]?).

I am just now changing over to the new licenses

[MarkWatson]

I use CC licenses for my Java AI and Common Lisp primer "free web books" and was the 'featured commoner' a few years ago.

I am pleased that CC is not standing still on licenses. Although I have written 14 published books, there are a few strong reasons why I am transitioning to CC open content authoring; the the primary reason is that I tend to be interested in niche technical areas and conventional publishers in the past have pressured me to tailor my works to a larger market. I am in the slow process of "dual publishing" my CC licensed content: free PD downloads and lulu.com instant print books for a fee for the occasional reader who wants a physical book.

My original motive for doing CC open content was simply that I got tired of having teachers, etc. ask if they good copy a chapter or two of my published books for their students - and my having to turn down their requests because my publishers own my material. Other reasons for CC based open content are a wider readership and thus more frequent interesting connections with my readers.

Really, the only advantage of using publishers is making money :-)

Re:

[MarkWatson]

a typo: I meant: "free PDF downloads"

Re:

[Raenex]

The parent's comment deserved consideration, but somebody modded it down instead of replying with a counter-argument:

[..]
Rather than releasing people from moral rights to the greatest extent possible, CC decided to impose these moral rights restrictions on the entire world. Worse, the terminology is hamfisted and more restrictive than the moral rights laws almost anywhere. As a result you must comply with this vague term as well as the applicable moral rights laws.

Re:

[Raenex]

The whole thing [proliferating licenses] is so crazy and short-sighted.

I agree.

We only need three licenses, and they are completely compatible in one direction: 1. a public domain license, saying that you can do whatever you want with it;

Agree. I like this version [ezinearticles.com], as it's short and sweet.

2. the BSD (a.k.a. MIT) license, which requires attribution to the original authors, but is otherwise free;

I disagree. BSD can go away. Use a public domain license. If you want credit, just make sure yo