What is the best Free Culture license? (v2)

I’m not sure what the best free non-software license is. That is, a license that respects the public’s freedom for things which are software, but not functional software - a digital manual for a program, not the program software itself, for example.

I’m sure who writes the most popular licenses used in this way is, though: Creative Commons.

The Only Acceptable Creative Commons License

One of the beautiful paradoxes of copyleft licenses is that their restrictions create more freedom.

Personally I use GNU+Linux and not a BSD. GNU+Linux, being mostly GNU GPL licensed, is a more powerful and reliable and flexible OS than BSD UNIX, being mostly BSD licensed, because copyleft ensures freedom, and freedom makes more powerful and reliable and flexible software. The GPL creates more freedom, so GNU+Linux is better. The GPL is clearly the best Free Software license.

Thing is, I don’t write software.

But because I appreciate what copyleft does to software quality and freedom, if I publish something for community development, I want to publish under a copyleft license.

So the only acceptable Creative Commons license for me is the CC-BY-SA.

“Non Commercial” Considered Harmful

As I want to make a living from Free Culture, I consider non-commercial terms harmful. This makes about half the CC licenses unacceptable.

Firstly, if I contribute to something with this license, I’ll be unable to use it at all to helping people through paid computer coaching.

Secondly, non-commercial terms create a giant sandbox effect that really limits the Free Culture that anyone can draw on to mix things together - you can’t take a CC-BY-NC sound and a CC-BY film and mix them together. So there’s really a bunch of obnoxious fences cutting up the supposed creative commons, and this is a real shame.

Having said this, perhaps Non-Commercial terms can work favourably if they expire. The way AFPL GhostScript worked in practice is an example of such an expiring license, in that it was only good for the most recent version, which was always no more than a year away. The penultimate release was under the GPL, and recently only the GPL is being used. I’d love to hear more about why that change happened.

This is very different to the way that, in theory, a CC-NC work will return to the public domain; in practice copyright is being extended for 20 years every 20 years, and can be taken as infinite from now on for the purposes of postmodern culture.

In the same way that you can “dual-license” things - such as Firefox, which is made available under your choice of GPL, LGPL, and MPL - you could license a work under CC-BY-SA-NC with an expiration to CC-BY-SA. Of course, this means that the expiration is expansive, rather than exclusive, otherwise the remixed works done in the initial period/license would become invalid, which wouldn’t be good.

What other CC licenses are left?

There are very occaisionally strategic reasons for not using copyleft, and the CC-BY might be useful for that. But it lacks an ‘upgrade’ clause to CC-BY-SA and this lack of interoperability is a real shame.

I think CC should have considered creating a hierarchy for its licenses, and allowed free culture to get more free, friction-free.

When I initially thought of this, I wondered why this wasn’t done already, because it seems so obvious, especially with the Lesser GPL being designed in this way. But Creative Commons doesn’t take a principled approach.

Plus, like the expiration idea, its a bit complex and so misses the consumer profile that CC is marketed to: If its hard to explain in 10 words or less on the ‘human readable’ deed, its unlikely to be in Creative Commons. The GPL license text is remarkably easy to read by humans though, you just need to print it out and sit down with it for 45 minutes; I guess this is too much to ask in these postmodern times, though.

“No Derivatives” can be free

The other CC license is the “No Derivatives” one. The question of if this is free or not is quite interesting, because its the root of the problems with the GNU Free Documentation License and Debian.

Richard Stallman’s famous “3 categories of works” makes a case for CC-BY-ND.

But rather than a drawn out license, a simple copyright statement of “Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.” does the trick, and is what Richard uses for his own essays of opinion.

This is particularly interesting, because Richard is distinguishing different types of works, in the same way that cultural proprietors seek to: “This movie is worth a lot so it can only be played once, but this album can be played as many times as you want but only only on this device.”

My natural reaction is to reject this because to me, its all just bytes now, and they can be used, copied and modified as much as I can imagine: Its all “software.”

But one of the primary concepts of Computer Science is to make a distinction between code and data. While films and music are now bytes, they are data, and the freedoms essential for code aren’t relevant, each kind of thing needs its own kinds of freedoms.

Indeed, copyright has always worked like this: Copyright terms last different lengths for different kinds of work. (This is a great way of teasing out where there is no such thing as “Intellectual Property,” by the way. If these things are really property, how come they expire at all, and how come some things (like typographic designs in the UK) expire after only 20 years?)

So it sounds reasonable to treat different kinds of works differently, and that there are 3 broad categories of works, with some borderline cases like fonts - which are both functional works (software) and artistic works (typefaces) at the same time.

But actually, there is no distinction between code and data. It is all bytes. The javascript code running in this webpage is clearly code, but we treat it as page data. More visibly, the Flash code running YouTube is clearly code, but we treat it as page data. In terms of software freedom, is running Gnash and playing Flash files equivalent to running QEmu and playing a Microsoft Vista virtual machine image? Maybe we can comfort ourselves with the elite GDB support in Gnash makes up for things, haha

Anyway. The purpose of CC-BY-ND is to encourage as widespread verbatim copying as possible, and this may or may not be suitable for certain kinds of work. If it is, the CC logo might help people understand they can copy it freely, but its complex terms compared to Richard’s simple verbatim statement may cause unneccessary bother.

No Logo

And there are wider problems with the Creative Commons logo.

“People have a tendency to disregard the differences between the various Creative Commons licenses, lumping them together as a single thing. That is as mixed-up as supposing San Francisco and Death Valley have similar weather because they’re both in California. Some Creative Commons licenses are free licenses; most permit at least noncommercial verbatim copying. But some, such as the Sampling Licenses and Developing Countries Licenses, don’t even permit that, which makes them unacceptable to use for any kind of work. All these licenses have in common is a label, but people regularly mistake that common label for something substantial.”
It is telling that Lessig regards the creators of a YouTube viral advertisement using NC music without observing the licence then paying the musician when they got caught as a success story. It is a success story for the New Permission Culture, not Free Culture.
Imagine a cabal of IP maximalists commissioning a double agent to pose as a libertarian. This would be the mission:
  1. Reinforce copyright. Promote its use, not abandonment, in popular culture.
  2. Isolate libertarians. Segregate free culture into a non-commercial ghetto. Preserve commercial exploitation for publishers.
  3. Enforce commercial impotence. Evangelise the purity of the gift economy. Establish commercial exploitation as a sin. Prohibit even private commercial exploitation of free culture.

Alternatives To The Giant

So what other free non-software licenses are viable?

http://www.freedomdefined.com is a great resource that lists all the license with some general use that uphold the principles of software freedom. But almost all of them are obscure.

The exception is the GNU Free Documentation License, thanks to its use by most Wikimedia Foundation projects, like Wikipedia.

This means a lot to me, and since I’d like my work to be interoperable with their projects, rather than a few CC-BY-SA things, this is my preferred license at the moment.

However, is also has problems:

“However, the full license must always be printed with the document and there are legal incompatibilities with the original GPL license for software.”
“It’s an adware-book licence! Even if the original author doesn’t activate the adware clauses, any later modifier can.”

There is something of a solution developing to these problems, with the GPLv3 project: The Simple Free Documentation License.

This will be available as an option to all existing FDL works that do not have invariant sections (the ‘adware’ stuff) and makes me happier about using the FDL.

For the moment, I’ll use the FDL in my own work, and contribute to things that are CC-BY-SA.

The Open Font Library Wiki

What started all this off was the Open Font Library Wiki, which uses the CC-BY-SA license, and to which I’d like to contribute to. However, I’d also like the ability to remix what happens to my contributions with the Wikipedia collective’s projects, especially wikibooks.org which already has a free Graphic Design book.

One proposed solution was to mashup the two documents with a “cut’n’shut” approach of heavy verbatim quoting. This is obviously not optimal, but my understanding is that to remix works like this by you need license compatibility anyway, because of the special meaning of the phrase ‘combined work’ in copyright law.

“Dual Licensing” or “Metalicensing” is a solution in use by others, but it is messy and easily creates unmergable sandboxed branches. A one way solution is no good for me, though I first noticed this license in use a few days ago in the Ubuntu 6.10 Introductory Help system.

But I heard there is movement at the FSF and at CC to make the FDL and the CC-BY-SA licenses compatible. While maybe naieve, I have faith that this will happen, as more people than just me must be facing the problem. And it will be painless too, because the FSF and CC use an underappreciated copyleft technique I call “automatic update.”

The relevant sections of the licenses are:

“Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.”
“You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License, or …”

This has technique has lately been a source of concern for proprietary interests, now that GPLv3 is patching their workarounds on GPLv2. I personally think its an underappreciated innovation that has been quietly designed to pre-empt future workarounds and appears to function perfectly.

While FSF makes the automatic update optional by letting you specify a version, as the Linux Kernel developers have, CC makes it mandatory. And it not visible at all on the ‘human readable’ side. So I wonder when people write “CC-BY-SA 2.0” they realise that actually the legal text says any later version…

(I’ve seen the technique called other labels elsewhere, but I’m not sure of a canonical name. If you know it, please let me know.)

So I no longer see any issue contributing to CC-BY-SA works, like the OFLB wiki, because I’m sure that they will become interoperable with (S)FDL works soon enough.

Creative Commons License
The What is the best Free Culture license? (v2) by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
March 29, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

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