Feb 26

Creative Commons Licenses too Restrictive?

English Creative Commons, English, IP Add Comment (4)

I’m still something of a newbie in the blogosphere but as I “surf” from blog to blog I can’t help but notice the popularity of Creative Commons licenses. Most blogs seem to display a “some rights reserved” button these days. Since I, by default, am hardly allowed to do anything with content I find on the web, I think this is a good thing. Any explicit license grant is much better than no license at all and a standardised license like a CC license is even better. (Certifying non-control is a good thing.) However, I think that most people choose unnecessarily restrictive licenses, even when using CC. From my random observations, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike seems to be the most common CC license. Today, this was confirmed by statistics from Creative Commons that show that 37% of the pages that link to a Creative Commons license link to Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

I fail to see a good reason for this. Attribution I can understand, but the others? Blogs are made available for free (as in no cost) on the web. Most bloggers want as many people as possible to read what they have to say. So why prevent someone from, say, printing one of your blog posts in a newspaper or magazine?

I would actually have more sympathy for an Attribution-NoDerivs License. This is similar to what, e.g., Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation use in many cases. Their essays (like these) are typically equipped with a copyright notice and “Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.” For political texts this makes much more sense than a requirement that any use be non-commercial.

As a general rule, I don’t believe that it is essential for people to have permission to modify all sorts of articles and books. The issues for writings are not necessarily the same as those for software. For example, I don’t think you or I are obliged to give permission to modify articles like this one, which describe our actions and our views. – Free Software and Free Manuals

You want to spread the article as much as possible and the only necessary requirement is that people do not change it so that your oppinions are misunderstood. Many blog posts belong to this category. Bloggers express opinions by commenting on news, other blogs etc.

So why the restrictive licenses? Bloggers, please comment!