[okfn-discuss] Problems of nomenclature

Sat Mar 3 17:34:23 UTC 2012

Thanks Peter and Rob,

First things first, I've been bold and nominated renaming 'Open content
licenses' to 'Alternative copyright licenses' (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2012_March_3).
I think that makes the most sense and it remains a coherent category.
Hopefully you folks will back me up if it meets with opposition.

(Perhaps someone could make a new article on 'Alternative copyright
licenses' too, which could discuss all these different concepts).

*Peter: *

In your reply you CCed the open access mailing list - would you like us to
as well?

What is "semi-libre"?

I would define a category of some rights reserved works called 'common
content', which are works that can be shared verbatim by any person for any
noncommercial purpose. I think that's a coherent category, and so does
Creative Commons: one justification for their dropping the DevNations and
Sampling licences is that they perceived the permissions granted by
BY-NC-ND as a 'threshold' that any CC licence should grant.

Libre (in the open knowledge sense, not the libre OA sense) would be one
part of common content, with semi-libre being all common content that
doesn't meet the libre threshold.

That's my definition, anyway. Below, I explain why I think having a
supercategory for 'free' and 'not free, but kinda close' makes sense.

In the Open Access community Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad have defined
> "libre" as "the removal of some permission barriers". I think this is
> highly regrettable and we ran into this problem on  the OKF open-access
> list. I believed (wrongly) that libre was well-defined - it isn't. The
> removal of just one small barrier means that the mainstream "Open Access"
> community will call an artefact "libre". For example allowing someone to
> put their article into a repository named by a publisher could be described
> as libre.
>

Dammit, that's really disappointing! It's interesting that the term libre
was poisoned in the same way 'open content' was: a term drawn from FLOSS,
redefined as 'some rights reserved'.

For what it's worth, I think that this fuzziness is one reason why common
content is a good and useful term (or we need another term like it): people
clearly associate semi-libre and libre works, and they use the specific,
narrow 'free', 'libre' or 'open' to define the supercategory.

Rather than blurring the line between libre and semi-libre, then, I think a
term for the supercategory would actually help sharpen it. 'This is all
rights reserved content and that is common content. Within common content
you have semi-libre and libre works' makes libre more distinct than 'This
content is like libre, but you can't use it commercially ... Let's call it
libre anyway!'

(And for this reason, I'm going to continue to call 'free content' 'libre':
I think 'libre open access' is used rarely enough that we can win the
definition war here if we can offer the OA people a different term: 'let us
keep libre, you can call it X instead')

*Rob: *

If I have to lump all different kinds of non-EULA copyright licenses
together I just call them "alternative copyright licenses".

Great term! As I mentioned above, it's what I've used for my recommended
renaming.

It's deprecated and only of historic interest. Given its NC restriction
> it's also badly named.
> [...]
> *Please* don't call them "viral" licences. They are licences that
> require adaptations/derivatives to be placed under the same license, so
> "reciprocal" is a much better term. Apart from anything else, "viral" is
> a pejorative synonym for copyleft.
>

Agreed, agreed and agreed - but it's still on Wikipedia along with a bunch
of other non-libre licences, so we have to find a way of classifying it.
Refusing to classify it just means that people who don't understand the
difference will classify it as 'libre' or 'open' or 'free', continuing our
problems.

In particular, it and a lot of of other non-libre licences are referred to
as 'copyleft'. If I'm going to delete the erroneous reference to copyleft,
I need a term to substitute for it. At the moment I think 'share-alike' or
'reciprocal' are probably the best.

And please don't call non-free works semi-libre. There aren't Wikipedia
> pages for being a little bit pregnant, greenish red, or dead and alive
> things so I don't see the need for making up a category such as "free
> and almost but not actually free".
>

I've discussed the terms I use above in my answer to Peter, but the real
problem is that the category already exists and we need to do something
with it. I'm not proposing that we add a category, but that we find a
better description for one that already exists.

Great discussion, guys,

*Chris Sakkas
**Admin of the FOSsil Bank wiki <http://fossilbank.wikidot.com/> and the
Living Libre blog and microblog <https://twitter.com/#%21/living_libre>.*
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