and so it begins
Today, Creative Commons launches a fund raising campaign. The trigger is some bizarrely complicated requirement of the IRS that nonprofits demonstrate not just support from some large, wise, foundations, but also "public support." So we've got an (urgent) need to demonstrate that support, through, well, support.
Over the course of the campaign, I'm going to be writing a weekly email that lays out the story of Creative Commons. There will be some surprise guest email authors as well as some replies to critics, and lots of reflection. You can subscribe to the letters here. They'll be short and again just weekly. The first one is posted here. And of course, please, whatever you can, you can support Creative Commons here.
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Comments (8)
I'd like to know why I can't plug in my own attribution requirements. For instance, if I release a picture under the CC, I want to specify that any page using that pic must contain a specific link. According to a discussion I had on cc-community, apparently I can't do that under the CC.
Actually, you can use the new attribution license to specify the attribution, including a link.
They started this campaign just to spite me, didn't they? I wouldn't buy a shirt with the CC logo anyway. People would think I'm hearing impared (closed captioned) and start signing to me and I wouldn't understand and they'd think I'm ignoring them and be offended. I preferred the logo on the old button that spelled it out.
Actually, Barry, I've worn a CC t-shirt for a few months now, and the only comments I've gotten are a "Creative Commons! Hell yeah!" once or twice.
On the other hand, my shirt is the old green one. I wouldn't buy one of these new, weird things on Cafepress.
I should have posted this earlier, but here's the message I was referring to.
That links to this flickr page containing an example of what I want to do.
Are the replies to my post wrong? If so, why doesn't flickr have a field where people can enter their attribution requirements?
See also the link to the wikipedia discussion in my message.
The last time I looked (more than two years ago, see
http://k.lenz.name/LB/archives/000348.html), people are free to modify Creative Commons licenses any way they please. MIT has done that at the time. The "policies" page at Creative Commons has not changed in the meantime. It still says: "We do not assert a copyright in the text of our licenses. Modified versions of our licenses, however, should not be labeled as 'Creative Commons' licenses."
That would mean that people could start writing plugins, like with software development. Someone could write a plugin expressly allowing indexing even by for-profit search engines under a non-commercial license. Someone else could write a plugin that does the opposite (clearly deny permission for indexing by commercial companies like Google). Of course the latter would do nothing if the courts in a particular country say that search engines don't need a license in the first place.
Modified versions of our licenses, however, should not be labeled as ‘Creative Commons’ licenses.”
Unfortunately, I'm not MIT. So, the "Lonewacko License Which Is A Derived Version of the CC License" would be ignored by many people. If they wanted to use the property in question, they'd have to spend the time ascertaining the differences between the LLWIADVOTCCL and the regular CC. Most wouldn't bother.
And, there's the issue of things like freshmeat, flickr, etc.: sites that are set up to use certain licenses already. It's much easier to fit into their framework by using one of the well-known licenses.
So, it would be nice if a way could be developed to either a) plugin your own specific attribution requirements, or b) create a sub-type of the attribution version of the CC license that already has my requirements. In the b) case, the only modification the user would provide would be the URL they wanted and the anchor text to be used. That case would avoid all possibilities of someone's "plugin" breaking the license in some way, not being legal in some ways or localities, etc. etc.
It's odd that with all the public use of creative commons licensing, this sort of thing is still needed from the IRS perspective.