[okfn-discuss] Problems of nomenclature

Sat Mar 3 20:37:27 UTC 2012

I prefer the term public copyright licences, as it does add meaning - public - whereas to take meaning from just copyright licences needs an understanding of where copyright comes from and what it means. Too much baggage.
Earlier Chris Sakkas suggested a "category of some rights reserved works called 'common content'", but to me this did not ring well. To me 'commons' content makes more sense. 
In the UK, there is common land, which usually refer to land that is collectively owned, but this often means highly fragmented and distributed rights to a range of defined uses of it. Very complex. But commons is more aligned, in my mind, with creative commons, a simpler legal regime. 
But I am not a lawyer.
David
David Hirst
Mobile:  +44 7831 405443

-----Original Message-----
From: okfn-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:okfn-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Mike Linksvayer
Sent: 03 March 2012 20:10
To: Open Knowledge Foundation discussion list
Subject: Re: [okfn-discuss] Problems of nomenclature

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Chris Sakkas <sanglorian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).

I don't think "alternative" adds anything. Just "copyright licenses"
or "public copyright licenses". The latter conveys some information that is true and is more used than "alternative". I said something like that on the rename discussion. But the proposal as-is would be a big improvement, thanks for pushing on it!

>> 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'.

I think "open content" was defined or redefined or whatever in a problematic fashion long before "libre OA" -- http://opencontent.org/definition/ dates from 1998 as discussed in
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1123 (I generally think berating people for saying "open source" is stupid, but also find it hilarious in a bad way that it got [mis]translated to meaning something different than free software, leading to, or perhaps merely contributing to, a long history of sorrow in non-software domains).
The author of that, David Wiley, has at least for the past several years advocated primarily for CC-BY, but AFAIK is pretty attached to his definition of "open content".

I thought about complaining about "libre OA" when the concept was announced, as it was clearly degrading to the most unambiguous term used (libre), but didn't out of some combination of "science" not being my field and laziness. In any case, AFAIK "libre OA" is not widely used and of people who have heard the term, I bet not many know what it means. Maybe Peter Suber would be willing to issue an update of some sort. In http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm he did say "It's provisional in the sense that I'll continue to look for better terms."

Mike

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