[open-linguistics] On CC-ND and CC-NC licensing

Mon Dec 3 23:28:54 UTC 2012

Dear all,

for those not on the okfn-discuss list, I forward a text by Richard  
Stallmann, with ermphasis by Everton Zanella Alvarenga. We had some  
discussions about ND/NC licensing before, an issue still unresolved, even  
for the LLOD cloud, and the problems and arguments are not so different in  
the on-line education world (at least if you consider using their data to  
build a corpus on your own), so, it may be of interest to the list.

All the best,
Christian

------- Forwarded message -------
From: "Everton Zanella Alvarenga" <everton.alvarenga at okfn.org>
To: "Open Knowledge Foundation discussion list"  
<okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org>
Cc:
Subject: [okfn-discuss] On-line education is using a flawed Creative  
Commons license
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 08:10:05 -0800

An interesting text by Stallman, which I copy bellow and emphasize some  
points in italic. We could improve the article on permission culture at  
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_culture

See also a recent post by Rufus  
http://blog.okfn.org/2012/10/04/making-a-real-commons-creative-commons-should-drop-the-non-commercial-and-no-derivatives-licenses/

On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license

Prominent universities are using a nonfree license for their digital  
educational works. That is bad already, but even worse, the license they  
are using has a serious inherent problem.

When a work is made for doing a practical job, the users must have control  
over the job, so they need to have control over the work. This applies to  
software, and to educational works too. For the users to have this  
control, they need certain freedoms (see gnu.org), and we say the work is  
"free" (or "libre", to emphasize we are not talking about price). For  
works that might be used in commercial contexts, the requisite freedom  
includes commercial use, redistribution and modification.

Creative Commons publishes six principal licenses. Two are free/libre  
licenses: the Sharealike license CC-BY-SA is a free/libre license with  
copyleft, and the Attribution license (CC-BY) is a free/libre license  
without copyleft. The other four are nonfree, either because they don't  
allow modification (ND, Noderivs) or because they don't allow commercial  
use (NC, Nocommercial).

In my view, nonfree licenses are ok for works of art/entertainment, or  
that present personal viewpoints (such as this article itself). Those  
works aren't meant for doing a practical job, so the argument about the  
users' control does not apply. Thus, I do not object if they are published  
with the CC-BY-NC-ND license, which allows only noncommercial  
redistribution of exact copies.

Use of this license for a work does not mean that you can't possibly  
publish that work commercially or with modifications. The license doesn't  
give permission for that, but you could ask the copyright holder for  
permission, perhaps offering a quid pro quo, and you might get it. It  
isn't automatic, but it isn't impossible.

However, two of the nonfree CC licenses lead to the creation of works that  
can't in practice be published commercially, because there is no feasible  
way to ask for permission. These are CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA, the two CC  
licenses that permit modification but not commercial use.

The problem arises because, with the Internet, people can easily (and  
lawfully) pile one noncommercial modification on another. Over decades  
this will result in works with contributions from hundreds or even  
thousands of people.

What happens if you would like to use one of those works commercially? How  
could you get permission? You'd have to ask all the substantial copyright  
holders. Some of them might have contributed years before and be  
impossible to find. Some might have contributed decades before, and might  
well be dead, but their copyrights won't have died with them. You'd have  
to find and ask their heirs, supposing it is possible to identify those.  
In general, it will be impossible to clear copyright on the works that  
these licenses invite people to make.

This is a form of the well-known "orphan works" problem, except  
exponentially worse; when combining works that had many contributors, the  
resulting work can be orphaned many times over before it is born.

To eliminate this problem would require a mechanism that involves asking  
_someone_ for permission (otherwise the NC condition turns into a  
nullity), but doesn't require asking _all the contributors_ for  
permission. It is easy to imagine such mechanisms; the hard part is to  
convince the community that one such mechanisms is fair and reach a  
consensus to accept it.

I hope that can be done, but the CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA licenses, as  
they are today, should be avoided.

Unfortunately, one of them is used quite a lot. CC-BY-NC-SA, which allows  
noncommercial publication of modified versions under the same license, has  
become the fashion for online educational works. MIT's "Open Courseware"  
got it stared, and many other schools followed MIT down the wrong path.  
Whereas in software "open source" means "probably free, but I don't dare  
talk about it so you'll have to check for yourself," in many online  
education projects "open" means "nonfree for sure".

Even if the problem with CC-BY-NC-SA and CC-BY-NC is fixed, they still  
won't be the right way to release educational works meant for doing  
practical jobs. The users of these works, teachers and students, must have  
control over the works, and that requires making them free. I urge  
Creative Commons to state that works meant for practical jobs, including  
educational resources and reference works as well as software, should be  
released under free/libre licenses only.

Educators, and all those who wish to contribute to on-line educational  
works: please do not to let your work be made non-free. Offer your  
assistance and text to educational works that carry free/libre licenses,  
preferably copyleft licenses so that all versions of the work must respect  
teachers' and students' freedom. Then invite educational activities to use  
and redistribute these works on that freedom-respecting basis, if they  
will. Together we can make education a domain of freedom.

-- 
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
Open Knowledge Foundation Brasil

-- 
Christian Chiarcos
Information Sciences Institute
University of Southern California
4676 Admiralty Way #1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
tel: +1-310-448-9391
fax: +1-310-448-8599
http://purl.org/chiarcos/home
chiarcos at isi.edu
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