{"id":839,"date":"2012-08-29T19:55:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T19:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/?p=839"},"modified":"2013-07-09T22:39:54","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T22:39:54","slug":"deprecating-creative-commons-nc-may-not-be-a-good-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2012\/08\/29\/deprecating-creative-commons-nc-may-not-be-a-good-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Deprecating Creative Commons -NC may not be a good idea."},"content":{"rendered":"

There are serious calls to remove the -NC and -ND license options from Creative Commons 4.0.<\/a> The reasons are solid in their domain (software, science and education) and well thought out, but I suspect they’re still badly wrong and will hinder the idea of sharing culture outside that domain. Culture is not (quite) software.<\/p>\n

I’m not a fan of -NC and I do think the world would be better off without it in the long run, but you can’t just declare it so in the short run. My thesis is that there is a strong demand for an -NC option, by-nc-sa accurately describes how Internet culture actually works and that without -NC, people will share significantly less in general than they would with it. Either the -NC licenses will linger without maintenance, or stuff that would have been released -NC will just be left all rights reserved.<\/p>\n

I’ve had occasion to explain to people how proper free licenses<\/a> work and why Wikipedia uses them. You can reliably explode their heads by explaining just what “free content” means. For them, by-nc-nd is radical openness. There’s a lot<\/i> of room out in the big world to spread the very notion of shareability and letting go of control.<\/p>\n

For an encyclopedia, and education in general, you actually want to allow all the stuff -NC forbids<\/a>. For other fields, you may actually not. People also have a strong resistance to allowing someone else<\/i> to make money from their work when they don’t. (For whatever reason.)<\/p>\n

Quite a lot of photographers happily -NC their images but want to be able to sell them. I submit that having their images -NC is better for the world than having them all rights reserved. (That being so very concerned about \u00a35 a year from Getty Images is frankly delusional when you’ve spent thousands of quid and hundreds of hours getting there doesn’t change this.)<\/p>\n

Bloggers don’t necessarily want to put everything under a CC-by-sa licence. Ask the ones who’ve had the Guardian reproduce their stuff in Trolling Is Free without asking, notice or preserving the licence (but with their name and a lifted photo). This blog isn’t under any CC licence. Even Richard Stallman doesn’t put everything he writes under a free licence.<\/p>\n

I noticed a while ago (though I can’t find where I said so Update:<\/b> here<\/a>) that Internet folk culture — Tumblrs, fan fiction, LiveJournal icons, that sort of thing — tends to an ethos of the following:<\/p>\n