Creative Commons Releases "Zero" License 209
revealingheart writes "Plagiarism Today reports on the release of the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows you to waive copyright and related rights to your works, improving on the existing public domain dedication. This follows-on from their original announcement on CC0. The CC0 waiver system is a major step forward for the Creative Commons Organization in terms of their public domain efforts. Even though it isn't a true public domain dedication, it only waives the rights as far as they can be waived (Note: Moral rights, in many countries, can not be outright waived), it opens up what is likely as close to a public domain option as practical under the current legal climate."
Re:How amusing (Score:2, Insightful)
i respectfully submit (Score:5, Insightful)
that change, in any society, on any issue, occurs in one of two ways:
1. gradual, progressive, incremental change
2. stagnation, followed by massive revolution
#1 occurs when the system is such that it can absord gradual challenges to the status quo
#2 occurs when some sort of challenge, say, a technological one, such as the internet, represents such a dramatic fundamental modification to the order of a system, say, intellectual property law, that there is no way for the system to digest and incorporate
so this cc0 license, while laudable, seems to me like putting a bandaid on the stump of a severed hand: fruitless
no, he only thing that is going to happen here is revolution: individuals, not because they are amorla pirates, but just because they want to consume their culture (and it is their culture) within suitable parameters of inconvenience, will just reject the entire intellectual property legal system
currently, this is a very hot topic on slashdot, has been for years, but we are the canaries in the coal mine. none of this has really trickled down as a conceptual challenge to the average joe on the street. and when it does, and it is going to, the average joe on the street will, en masse, completely ignore current intellectual property law. he is doing so now, in dribs and drabs, subconsciously and not explicitly. but the tension will increase, and then boom: a veritable new legal landscape. change bubbling up form the bottom, rather than imposed from above
Re:This Post (Score:5, Insightful)
This post is not covered under any license.
The problem is, under copyright law (US at least), your post is automatically copyrighted by you, and I'm not allowed to redistribute it without your permission. Giving that permission (usually with qualifications) is what a license does. So without a license, what you say below is false:
You are free to copy it, edit it, distribute it, delete it, mod it up, mod it down, etc.
Is this is true, then you have licensed me (and the rest of Slashdot) to do all these things, and what you said above (that it is not covered under any license) is false.
Re:i respectfully submit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This Post (Score:2, Insightful)
Copyright != license.
Re:Fix the Underlying (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:half-baked reasoning (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How amusing (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. It's like certain rights under labor law: making them inviolable, impossible even willingly to give away, precludes certain abuses. Just as I can't give up my basic human rights in a contract (e.g., selling myself into indentured servitude), I shouldn't be able to give up certain rights over work I produce. For example, in France "moral rights" include the right of an artist to claim to have produced a certain work of art (which is distinct from ownership of the physical work or of rights to copy it). The artist retains the right to "disown" a work or to claim authorship of it. That could matter, for example, in the attribution of a literary prize, which depends on the authorship of a work but not on its copyright status. And it makes perfect sense that one not be allowed to sign away that basic right.
no. flat out wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
you are saying the desire to be free is only dependent upon dogmatic control as a contrasting agent
i assert to you that the desire to be free is an organic desire in its own right, with no preconditions
freedom is not a product of slavery. freedom is an original impulse
i really don't know how else to articulate how completely and utterly wrong you are. your idea of cause and effect is completely bogus
Re:timed-release license? (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it highly likely the easy availability of timed release would cause some authors who would have released immediately under a public license or into the public domain to use the timed release instead. Consider the simplest case, where one could choose a time delay from the CC license chooser. I bet many people would select it just because they could, just as well over half of people select the NonCommercial option, even though in many cases doing so is counter to what one would hope sharing to accomplish. One could attempt to segregate people one suspects would only free their works if they could do so in a time-delayed manner, but I don't know how one would do that well. Seems like something that should be studied in an experimental econ lab.
Re:I disrespectfully do not submit (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no beef with teachers and learners who do what they have to do.
Anyone who can be meta enough to post on slashdot, I submit, should be thinking further ahead -- ensuring that in a decade there are enough OER that anyone in the world has freedom, regardless of what the copyright regime is (or is not). You and others at WikiEducator and similar sites are doing just that, so many cheers for your activity!
Fighting for fair use and other exceptions is absolutely part of a long term strategy. Critically important to the long term success of free content, analogous to the fight against software patents is critical to the long term success of free software. I can expand that argument if anyone wants to argue. :-)
Re:i am presented an environment (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you think I make that assertion? I do not. I agree with your assertion. There is always a latent desire to be free of a bad, whether the bad exists or not. I desire to be free of zombie attacks, right now, regardless of the existence of zombie attacks.
Let's go back a bit. I suspect where we might disagree is how one effectively rejects the strict regimen. I say the most effective way to do so is to unambiguously free your creative output, such that even one who does not reject the regimen understands that they are free to to use your creativity. Do you disagree with this? If so, what do you think the most effective way to reject the regimen is?
Re:goes further (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Official CC0 launch coming early March (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bad idea if you're against copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:timed-release license? (Score:3, Insightful)
Brad Kuhn of SFLC (formerly of FSF) put it very well [softwarefreedom.org]:
Of course CC doesn't do software licenses and some of its licenses are only semi-free by the standards of free as in (software) freedom as applied to culture [freedomdefined.org], but the overall lesson of the responsibility of license stewards applies.
Re:goes further (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fix the Underlying (Score:3, Insightful)
And I didn't mean to imply it is either/or, either. :-)
I suspect that building voluntary commons (in software and culture) is probably the most effective means of advancing long term reform -- they demonstrate that restrictive copyright is not necessary for innovation, creativity, etc.
Re:goes further (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no need to create new licenses to have CC-like easy-to-understand software licenses. CC has experimented with "human readable" deeds for a few software licenses and could work more with groups like FSF and OSI to do more and improve on those.
Noncommercial public licensing failed in software for good reasons, and it would be really dumb to introduce it at this point. Many people complain about NC culture licenses, but for software, they are much worse for a variety of reasons that I'll write about eventually, but see some of the bullets at http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/how-far-behind-free-software-is-free-culture-presentation [slideshare.net]
There are lots of poor software licenses out there, but the current generation of ones that are widely used and had a ton of attention during drafting are excellent, ie Apache2 and A/L/GPL3. To the extent they are long it is because they need to be (excepting preambles perhaps). CC licenses are also pretty long.