[Openfontlibrary] Creative Commons Non-Commercial

[Dave Crossland]

Hi All,

Thought this might be of interest :-)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com>
Date: 15-Jun-2007 11:54
Subject: Re: [backstage] www.FreeTheBBC.info
To: backstage at lists.bbc.co.uk


On 15/06/07, Ian Betteridge <ianbetteridge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Pro-am's can do great work (and can
> graduate to doing it as professionals), but that's not the same as saying
> the man in the street can walk in and be a top photographer, which is what
> was stated earlier. It takes a long time to get that good, unless you're
> extremely gifted.

The rise of digital authoring tools means that as time passes, the man
in the street is more and more likely to be a pro-am, and more and
more likely to be that good - especially if he can combine his talents
with others collaboratively, "standing on the shoulders of giants."

And, he's going to be more and more likely to seek ways to monetize
that value without becoming a full time professional author.

This is why non-commercial Creative Commons licenses are a problem,
imo: For about 10 years the free software movement was almost totally
non-commercial, and then business kicked off and has powered the whole
thing since then. IMO this is directly attributable to the
copyleft-thanks and commercial-use-please aspects of the GPL.

As you can see in this graph, http://swivel.com/graphs/show/9227397
(from http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_statistics :-) the CC-NC
licenses are by far the most popular, with CC-NC-ND and CC-NC-SA at a
similarly higher growth than the others - and BY and BY-ND are more
popular than BY-SA.

Free culture is shooting itself future self in the foot, because
non-commercial licenses will hobble the remix market.
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol4-1/coates.asp is a good
academic paper on the 1st and 2nd generation of CC users. What do the
3rd, 4th, 5th look like? Will they be helped or hindered by NC terms?
A CC users I recently queried about this (a photographer) said that NC
terms don't matter, because they are happy to give permission to low
budget organisations. But a culture of permission is not a culture of
freedom.

Its not that people shouldn't be paid for authorship - they should, of
course - but that the social system of payment should not be
draconian.

If copyright duration was contracting instead of expanding, I'd be
much more favourable to NC terms - but the reality is that the public
domain has got a large gap in it from the early 1930s until the early
2000s when CC appeared, and a NC commons is not ideal.

--
Regards,
Dave


-- 
Regards,
Dave