[WikiEN-l] cc-by-nw (Encyclopedia of Earth)

Sun Sep 24 21:28:49 UTC 2006

On 24 Sep 2006, at 22:01, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are  
>> free
>> content licenses, some are quite definitely not.
>
> It's an important objection:
>
> At Wikimania, Lessig gave a striking presentation on the importance of
> "Read/Write culture".  As a tangential point in his talk he mentioned
> that Creative Commons is having fantastic success and presented a
> graph showing the increase in the number of link-backs to their free
> licenses.
>
> So, I thought it was only natural to ask what percentage of the CC
> linkbacks were to actually non-free licenses. Unfortunately they only
> took one question from the room, so that audience was unable to hear
> my question.
>
> I grabbed Larry right after his talk and asked him, and fortunately he
> knew off the top of his head:  2/3rds.
>
> Creative commons is a brand widely associated with Free Content and
> all the good things we say about free content, but when the layman
> reaches for Creative Commons licenses what he gets is usually not free
> content.
>
> While it's true that people are selecting unfree licenses, they are
> often doing so without the deeper understanding of the longer term
> wider scale implications of their decisions. ... I'd feel a lot better
> if folks had to watch Larry's video on Read/Write culture and be told
> the ways that the various selections inhibit free culture before they
> can pick the more restrictive licenses... :)
>
> So I have to side with RMS on this one.

Most contributors donating their own content
don't care very much what licence they use
as they are unlikely to make any financial
gain anyway. Look at the amount of material
put on YouTube, who get rights automatically.

There are far too many options anyway when
uploading a file - who knows how many
contributors just give up straight away.

So decide what rights the project needs,
and ask for those. It works for text on WP.