Copyleft vs Copyright at Rose's
Siobhan's polite rant about the fine points of her Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike License (which I also protect my works under) made me want to highlight this important initiative for protecting whilst allowing fair use of creative works.
I've had arguments about this before, so I thought I'd present as illustration one such that I had on Rose's Forum a couple of years ago. The thread concerned transgender fiction, and at one point someone raised the issue of copyright on digitally published works, to which I replied:
To which I got this reply, which took me aback more than a fair bit:
I felt this completely missed the point and felt I had to point out the significance of CC in the realm of digital creation:
I appreciate that for the person replying, who was creating, a monolitic, "old media" piece of work, a "novel" (albeit publishing it online), that Creative Commons might not be the corrcect framework.
However, it did rankle that they moved from there to calling Creative Commons, the exemplar of the concepts of fair use and free culture a "racket", a "license to steal".
That made me absolutely LIVID.
I know, I know. I should avoid discusion forums.
All bloggers and other people sharing creative works on the web should at least consider Creative Commons as a licensing framework. CC licensing is built into the flickr app, for example.
If you want to read further, start at free culture advocate and CC founder Lawrence Lessig's Wikipedia entry and start clicking.
Oh, and if you want one reason why Copyleft has to be right, go no further than Bill Gates' condemnation of it :)
Attribution: Thanks to Siobhan who got me thinking about this again.
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