Lessig

The argument is, sadly, a typical argument that I hear from techno-centric people. The same argument was made about automobiles: Initially if you had a car you were also a mechanic, and the thought of non-mechanics driving was discounted: who would trust a road full of people that couldn't build their own car?

I ask the author: Does he write all of his code in assember? No, he uses a compiler. The CC licence is, essentially, a compiler that can only write a few, very specific, programs.

At the risk of making an adhomin attack, but really I'm just trying to inject some humor: It's ironic that people known for diets consisting totally of fast food would object to people that don't want to cook from scratch! :-)

Personally, I've really tried to like the Creative Commons project.
For some years, I've wondered about how to do free non-commerical
licensing of software, while retaining rights to commercial use. So
about every six months since it's been up, I read through the site and
have the same negative reaction. It's not that I disagree with the
licenses and would never use one, but that something just seems wrong.

I think "dissonance of message" is the initial cause of my reaction,
both at the surface presentation level and the underlying philosophy
level.

On the surface, we have a fluffy cartoon guide to what we are told is
a complex legal matter. We have a slick-spoken group of lawyers
saying, "Trust us, we're just here to help". We have inspirational
messages about changing the future of world, and examples showing how
to do this by creating our own mix tapes of techno music.

Going deeper, there is a philosophy of generosity backed by an
extremely defensive legal stance. We are presented with a myriad of
bulletproof license options allowing us to post our vacation photos
online securely, unlike when we used to just share them with friends
without a second thought. One almost eagerly awaits an infringement
just to be able to sue someone for misappropriating your gift to
society.

(OK, that last one is an exaggeration, but I bet there are quite a few
people who would like to see this license tested in court)

The GPL definitely comes associated with a worldview. Not everyone
who uses the license shares the view, but it's present:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. By offering a cafeteria
of license styles, CC tries to avoid endorsing any particular
worldview. But while not as explicit, I think think the CC project is
pervaded by a particularly legalistic worldview.

This view encourages one to think of everything one produces as
property, to exercise one's property rights by licensing this property
through well-defined contracts, and to be ready and prepared to defend
these rights by legal means. The view implies that society is
generally improved through greater attention to legal detail, and
specifically, that in the absence of explicit licensing, the societal
potential of the work is lost.

There's probably a lot of truth to this view, but instinctively I
don't think it's a good path to follow. I want to move in the
direction of less litigation, not more. I want personal trust to have
greater value than legal interpretation. I think the comparison
between CC licenses and housesitting is good.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/zestyping/36000.html?thread=132768#t132768

While there probably are legally enforceable housesitting contracts
out there, I don't think they would improve the situation. Making the
relationship more formal may actually work against both parties. A
sense of personal responsibility is lost, replaced by a sense of legal
defensibility. Maybe this is inevitable, but I hope not.

So enough gut-level criticism---what's the solution?

I think that Creative Commons needs to focus more on either commercial
or private use, and give up on trying to cover the full spectrum from
major-label record releases to family vacation photos under one
umbrella. The heavy commercial users already have legal mechanisms in
place, and don't need the cartoon approach. The small private user is
looking for much more lightweight solution, more akin to adding a line
"Copyright 2004, permission required for commercial use".

Personally, I think they could do the most good by focusing on private
users and encouraging them to explicitly allow others greater access
to their work. Instead of trying to convince large producers that
they should license material more freely than they currently do,
concentrate on the people who are already willing to let people use
their work but don't have a way of expressing to others that they are
allowed to do so. Instead of concentrating on bulletproof contracts,
work on reducing people's fear that they will be sued. And make it
all so simple that it can fit in a JPEG, MP3, or HTML comment.

A tall order, surely. But easier than convincing the courts to fix
the current copyright law, right?

I'd also like to know what's the deal with the Oyez project's licensing of oral arguments... the rest of their intellectual property page is quite draconian and anti-CC ( http://www.oyez.org/about/copyright.html ). Are they making the case that their fixation of the oral arguments is copyrightable? Further, what would Noise do with a less restrictive license?

I write this as an interested lay person.

In the thread on the livejournal site edm makes an important point about the destructive costs of trying to avoid standardization in the law (and isn't it a contradiction of the purpose and value of law to avoid standardization?).

I can only see the results of this leading to either a general ignoring of copyright terms or an avoidance of copyrighted material(essentially locking up this material).

Noise, whether intentionally or not, has accepted the replacement of "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" with "to maximize the control of the author and personal benefit to the author(or more accurately owner)" which is at the heart of agendas to pervert copyright and turn a temporary government grant of monopoly into a perpetual right of property equivalent to tangible property.

To add in another analogy:
Think of it as a card game. The content is what to do with the cards. You can make up your own rules and really learn what makes a good card game by experimenting with different rules. Or you can take a pre-existing set of rules that you know works well and just go with that. Texas Hold'em, being a well known and widely accepted game, doesn't take away from people coming up with new rules for their own game.

I also think that is what is great about CC. CC v2 is taking into account what people, such as remixers, wanted out of the licenses that didn't get covered in the originals. Ping's discussion with Noise brought about new input that the CC can incorporate in the next revision. An individual might not have thought about adding in an expiration date to their license.

Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of the public domain not to have a license at all? As with everyone else, I'm a bit perplexed about the Oyez situation.

We can provide cheap kamas for you. So you may as well come here to look at.