The Creative Commons licenses January 1, 2008
Posted by keito in : Licenses , comments closedThe Creative Commons family of licenses, created and administered by the Creative Commons organization founded by Lawrence Lessig, is a suite of licenses designed for easy use by both amateur and professional content creators around the world.
The Creative Commons licenses allow a great deal of freedom to modify, reuse, and redistribute content. Content creators can put a number of restrictions, or a combination on them, on their licenses. The restrictions are:
- Attribution (BY) – Any copies must cite the original author
- Share-Alike (SA) – Any copies must be shared under the same license as the original
- No Derivatives (ND) – No derivatives must be made; all redistributed copies must be verbatim copies of the original
- Non-Commercial (NC) – Derivatives or copies must not be made for commercial purposes
The entire number of combinations is 2^4 = 16; however, since the Share-Alike and No-Derivatives flags are mutually exclusive, four of those are invalid, and the last combination, no restrictions at all, is tantamount to releasing your content under the public domain, so is not a valid Creative Commons license. Also, licenses that do not have the Attribution clause used to exist, but have been phased out due to lack of demand.
Using these combinations, one can create the eleven Creative Commons licenses, which are named after their abbreviated restrictions: CC-BY-SA 3.0, for example. (3.0 is the version of the Creative Commons license; version 3.0 is the latest as of now.) Incidentally, this blog is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. That is, any derivatives or redistributions must be licensed under the same CC-BY-SA license, and must be attributed back to me.
The sheer power of the Creative Commons license comes partly from this — the ease of use with which content owners can license their content. You don’t need a law degree when licensing your content under these licenses; Creative Commons provides a clean, easy-to-use interface on their website that allows you to pick and match licenses according to your needs, and provides “human-readable” license deeds detailing, in very plain and simple language, the freedoms accorded by each Creative Commons license.
The Creative Commons licenses also have very high visibility on the Internet today. Not only are their icons professional-looking and recognizable from a distance, the sheer number of websites and services using their licenses is staggering. Some major users of Creative Commons include Flickr, the Wikimedia Commons, MIT OpenCourseWare, and soon Wikipedia. Furthermore, many service providers set Creative Commons as their default license (Blogger and even the Berkman Center’s blogging platform), coercing users who otherwise do not know or care about licenses to license their content under a Creative Commons license.
The advent of Creative Commons licenses is a welcome development for the open source community. More and more people are being introduced to the free licensing movement, and even large companies (including Microsoft with parts of its MSDN specifications and its MSDN Wiki) have begun to embrace this as well, further escalating this move. It’s reassuring to have one license framework that everybody can rely on and trust, and the stability and expertise of the Creative Commons organization can only help.
The GNU Free Documentation License December 24, 2007
Posted by keito in : Licenses , comments closedThe GNU Free Documentation License, or the GFDL, is a free license probably best known for being the license used by Wikipedia. It was designed by the Free Software Foundation, which is the parent body of the GNU Project (including Linux) and other famous licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The GFDL was originally designed for licensing software documentation for free software products. As the Preamble states, the license was developed “because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does.” However, the license goes on to state that the license can be used for other, more general documents (such as Wikipedia).
In a nutshell, the GFDL offers licensees the ability to “copy and distribute the [work] in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially,” and allows licensees to modify that work and redistribute it — provided that the derivative work be made available under the same terms as the original. The GFDL shares this viral quality with the GNU GPL, the other major license that the Free Software Foundation provides. This locks modifiers and distributors into the same licensing scheme; you can’t, for example, take a GFDL-licensed work, make a derivative, and release it for non-commercial use only.
One controversial aspect of the GFDL is that it provides provisions for “Secondary Sections” (basically, any sections in the work that describes the author or publisher’s connection to the work). These sections may not be modified in any resulting derivatives, and are called invariant sections. (If they are modified, the resulting copies must be redistributed under a different title). Secondary sections usually include documents detailing the philosophy of the original author (in the GFDL-licensed Emacs manual, for example, it is a lengthy section in the form of a Manifesto). Apparently this was written into the GFDL so that subsequent authors of documentation, who were sometimes in violation of the original philosophies as stipulated by the original author, would not be able to change the original manifestations thereof.
Another more practical problem of the GFDL is its full license text provision. Any distribution of GFDL-licensed material is required to include a copyright notice as well as the full text of the GNU Free Documentation License, which, when printed on US Letter size paper, is almost 8 pages long. Not only is this a problem, for example, when reprinting a GFDL work in a book, it’s an even bigger problem when all you need to do is redistribute one small image for inclusion in, say, a magazine.
Although it’s still rather rare for GFDL-licensed content to appear in print, the full license text provision of the GFDL has already led to some unwieldiness. For example, on Wikibooks, a Wikipedia sister project that collaboratively writes GFDL-licensed books instead of an encyclopedia, completed books are often distributed in PDF form. PDF such as these come with an 8-page appendix with the GFDL license text, complete with a paragraph on “How to use this License for your documents.”
While this is all well and good for spreading the GFDL, it leads to wasted paper and frankly, it looks rather unprofessional to have all this stuck to the back of a book. The GFDL still has a sense of the Unix geek ethos — the war they’re fighting is more guerilla than anything professional.
There are, however, alternatives to the GFDL that provide much of its liberties as well as its protections. A very good example of this is the Creative Commons licenses, specifically the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) license. In the next post I’ll cover Wikipedia and its relationship to the GFDL, and then go on to cover the Creative Commons licenses.