July 13th, 2007

From the email list associated with the Creative Commons group, I found an interesting thread, where it seems many members of the organization believe that the non-commercial option in the CC licenses should be abolished. As one person wrote, works licensed under cc didn't really challenged the dominant market paradigm. especially the most of them are licensed under 'noncommercial' licence.

There was discussion in the thread about how new models for artists will arise someday, and the use of the non-commercial license is an opening wedge. As example, thread members discussed how the software community now embraces many licenses that provide for free use of software: licenses such as GPL (GNU Public License), which prohibits use of GPL licensed work in new efforts that will not be released GPL; as compared to other licenses such as free-BSD, which allows such. I'm not up for another debate on CC, but I did notice the following from the thread:

it will take a little longer until the success of works under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA will really challenge the dominant market players, but it will happen.

True that this would come sooner if the people wouldn't need to go through a learning process that NC is not so necessary after all, but even the coding community took a while until they understood the workings of free software (even though they have much less heart and soul attached to their works compared to many artists)

My, aren't we precious.

Comments
1
Scott - 11:12 am 7/13/2007

That's because most programmers aren't batshit crazy like most designers. ;)

2
Bud Gibson - 10:06 pm 7/13/2007

What is the relevance of the GPL and CC licenses in today's business models? I thought this article by Tim O'Reilly summed up the issues well for the GPL.

When people want to make money, they fence off a resource in some way. Neither the GPL nor CC are going to buck that simple fact of life.

When people GPL code, they've decided they are not going to make money off the software itself. Rather, they are going to make money off of some kind of service, and they do fence that off. In this case, the GPL removes the incentive for anyone to try to package up the code for their service as a software product and sell it. Why wouldn't people expect to use CC in the same way? When you think about it, it's not surprising that people choose the CC non-commercial option. People are saying share my work all you want, but don't try to sell it.

PS Comment preview on your site is terrific.

3

Bud, you're miscarachterizing the GPL and Free Software/Open Source in general, though you are accurately describing common business models that make use of the GPL.

No software license that explicitly restricted commercial use would comply with the Open Source Definition, nor would the FSF consider it to be Free Software.

In any case, the GPL-equivalent CC license is BY-SA, not any of the NC licenses.

4
Shelley - 12:56 pm 7/14/2007

Scott, I dunno — I'm pretty batty.

Michael, thanks for clarification. Bud, thanks for note on comment preview.

5
Danny - 6:36 am 7/15/2007

Hmm, sorry for the cliche, but I bet "heart and soul" has a Long Tail kind of distribution. There certainly seems to be a similar ratio of interesting & compelling/awful art as useful & elegant/awful software. One difference is that most software has a fairly objective filter in whether it (mostly) works or not.

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the discussion. Comments are now closed, but you can contact the author of the post directly.