4 ms·

So... I'm somewhere between "yes obviously CC is intending to facilitate reuse" and "yes obviously people who choose it often do so because they see others choo

by Groxx 3y ago

So... I'm somewhere between "yes obviously CC is intending to facilitate reuse" and "yes obviously people who choose it often do so because they see others choosing it and don't read the fine details" and also "the majority of uses are probably acceptable by the creators"... ... and: if you wanted to just allow reuse we have a fantastically well-tread license for that - Public Domain. CC requires attribution. That means it requires attribution. Among other things. That is arguably the main point of CC over Public Domain. So this is kinda working as intended? There are obviously literal malicious trolls (manipulative, or following the law but intentionally targeting the most vulnerable rather than the main violators), but the amount of companies flagrantly violating these licenses is extreme and I don't feel any sympathy for them. Grabbing images off Google without researching their license is a fast track to getting sued, and it should be. That's the crux of any "don't steal from artists" and "exposure is not payment" argument.

ghaff 3y ago
The thing is that attribution as the term is normally used is insufficient. As Cory notes, all the CC licenses, except for CC0, actually require: Name the creator (either as identified on the work, or as noted in instructions to downstream users) Provide a URL for the work (either as identified on the work, or as noted in instructions to downstream users) Name the license Provide a URL for the license Note whether the work has been modified So a very normal photo credit like "CC photo by John Smith" is actually not appropriate Creative Commons attribution.
- Groxx 3y ago
  Which goes right back to "yes, but...". There's an enormous pattern of "it's okay to use X if I say it's not mine" both individually and commercially and it's not okay. The whole point of these licenses is to have a lever to turn that around and enforce payment, to try to keep the ecosystem as a whole healthy so individuals can live off it. Commercial entities that don't hard-require every image posted to their blog to be either new or come from e.g. Getty are willingly playing fast and loose and hoping they don't get sued. Not-for-profit individuals (e.g. personal blog posts) making an attempt at attribution: yeah I think the vast majority are entirely fine with that, but would lightly prefer accurate attribution, and targeting them is a troll act. Is that a majority of violators and CC creators? ... I don't know. Possibly? Should trolls be targeting them? Heck no. Does the 30 day grace period allow companies to willingly violate this and only fix it after they've made their profit and have nothing to lose, and the creator nothing to gain? Yes absolutely. If you actually don't care about attribution, distribute under Public Domain and ask for attribution when you think it's worthwhile. Many will likely say yes - I've seen loads of public domain images used with attribution. People like public domain contributions. If you do care, legal teeth are kinda required, and choosing CC means explicitly choosing legal teeth.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >The whole point of these licenses is to have a lever to turn that around and enforce payment, to try to keep the ecosystem as a whole healthy so individuals can live off it. I mostly disagree. As I recall early discussions, it was more rooted in enabling remix culture while ensuring creatives received appropriate credit. If direct monetization is the main consideration, I don't know why you'd use Creative Commons at all.
    - Groxx 3y ago
      That remix culture is definitely what it turned into and possibly what it was intended for and tons of that is a great success... but then why have violation terms at all? Seems like that "remix, please attribute" is just signaling intent, and then there's no need for a license dictating how violations are handled. It'd just be public domain with an unofficial request tacked on. --- I should probably clarify that I think a lot of these are coming from people who want to do more of their art, and that requires money, and many of them have been tricked into exposure rather than payment and that leads to them not doing more art because they're too busy with other stuff that does pay so they can live. It's a time bomb that isn't generally recognized until it explodes, and it almost always does, and then they care deeply and go looking for legal teeth. Exposure can be great. It's overwhelmingly exploited by companies that are capable of paying but choose not to. Changing that is why licenses have terms like this, otherwise what's the point of the license? Make it Public Domain.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        >tricked into exposure rather than payment Fully agree. In a prior stint as an IT industry analyst, we eventually started a non-paywall blog and (rarely) did free appearances at industry conferences. But people tried to get us to do free stuff all the time for the "exposure." Especially starting out it can be really tempting. But you have to really keep it in check if you're running a business. >Seems like that "remix, please attribute" is just signaling intent, and then there's no need for a license dictating how violations are handled. Viewed from the distance of 20ish years the CC licenses (other than CC0) look way too complicated. And it's not like CC works are routinely credited, even if imperfectly, anyway. It's not even clear to me that the MIT license couldn't just have been used (or extended) for non-code use.
pdonis 3y ago
> if you wanted to just allow reuse we have a fantastically well-tread license for that - Public Domain Public Domain isn't a license. It's a problematic legal concept. It's not clear whether you actually can place something into the public domain if it isn't in there automatically (for example being published pre-1922). Sure, you can say "I place this work in the public domain", but will that actually have the legal effect you want? Basically you are saying you relinquish ownership of the work, but if you don't own it, you can't claim to control what other people do with it--including claiming ownership of it under other legal concepts, such as the concept of "abandoned property"--if you find something lying around and nobody else claims ownership of it, you can. "Public Domain" gives no shield whatever against such shenanigans.
- Groxx 3y ago
  >Public Domain isn't a license. It's a problematic legal concept. ... Fair. I'll keep that in mind and try to find details for the future :) >[Under public domain] you can't claim to control what other people do with it Which is exactly what CC without actual legal threats achieves, yes. Which is why I say people do care, so making it toothless seems to defeat the point. As far as I'm aware, the rest of that (mostly ownership) is covered by copyright, which is applied by default if you say nothing. So: saying nothing and distributing it however you like already achieves more than CC-without-teeth because you can already sue people for using it or claiming it as theirs, and just choose not to. Which is why this whole change feels self-defeating to me.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > copyright, which is applied by default if you say nothing But does not allow reuse. So it's irrelevant to a discussion of what to do if you do want to allow reuse. > you can already sue people for using it or claiming it as theirs, and just choose not to But that puts anyone who wants to reuse your content in good faith at the mercy of your whim about whether or not to sue them. That is not a good basis for facilitating reuse. > this whole change feels self-defeating to me Meaning, fixing the attribution clauses in CC so that people have a reasonable time to cure violations before the $150K lawsuit threat? I don't see how that makes CC licenses any more or less "toothless" than they were before. It increases the difficulty of copyleft trolling, which was what it was intended to do. Yes, it means a 30 day delay after you give notice before you can sue someone for violating your license--but anyone who fixes the violation within 30 days of you giving them notice is not someone you want to sue anyway, because they're a good faith user. If we're talking about individuals or small businesses, what makes any license toothless in our current legal environment is the cost of a lawsuit. If you're an individual or small business and large corporation X reuses your content without meeting the terms of your license, whether it's the original CC or the current one, and refuses to fix the violation (presumably because it would be bad for their business), you're basically SOL anyway: you will run out of money to keep a lawsuit going long before corporation X runs out of legal devices to delay or obstruct you. No amount of rejiggering of a license is going to change that. Nor, for that matter, will not giving any license and relying on copyright law: you're still in the same position.

by Groxx 3y ago

ghaff 3y ago

The thing is that attribution as the term is normally used is insufficient. As Cory notes, all the CC licenses, except for CC0, actually require: Name the creator (either as identified on the work, or as noted in instructions to downstream users) Provide a URL for the work (either as identified on the work, or as noted in instructions to downstream users) Name the license Provide a URL for the license Note whether the work has been modified So a very normal photo credit like "CC photo by John Smith" is actually not appropriate Creative Commons attribution.

Groxx 3y ago
Which goes right back to "yes, but...". There's an enormous pattern of "it's okay to use X if I say it's not mine" both individually and commercially and it's not okay. The whole point of these licenses is to have a lever to turn that around and enforce payment, to try to keep the ecosystem as a whole healthy so individuals can live off it. Commercial entities that don't hard-require every image posted to their blog to be either new or come from e.g. Getty are willingly playing fast and loose and hoping they don't get sued. Not-for-profit individuals (e.g. personal blog posts) making an attempt at attribution: yeah I think the vast majority are entirely fine with that, but would lightly prefer accurate attribution, and targeting them is a troll act. Is that a majority of violators and CC creators? ... I don't know. Possibly? Should trolls be targeting them? Heck no. Does the 30 day grace period allow companies to willingly violate this and only fix it after they've made their profit and have nothing to lose, and the creator nothing to gain? Yes absolutely. If you actually don't care about attribution, distribute under Public Domain and ask for attribution when you think it's worthwhile. Many will likely say yes - I've seen loads of public domain images used with attribution. People like public domain contributions. If you do care, legal teeth are kinda required, and choosing CC means explicitly choosing legal teeth.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >The whole point of these licenses is to have a lever to turn that around and enforce payment, to try to keep the ecosystem as a whole healthy so individuals can live off it. I mostly disagree. As I recall early discussions, it was more rooted in enabling remix culture while ensuring creatives received appropriate credit. If direct monetization is the main consideration, I don't know why you'd use Creative Commons at all.
  - Groxx 3y ago
    That remix culture is definitely what it turned into and possibly what it was intended for and tons of that is a great success... but then why have violation terms at all? Seems like that "remix, please attribute" is just signaling intent, and then there's no need for a license dictating how violations are handled. It'd just be public domain with an unofficial request tacked on. --- I should probably clarify that I think a lot of these are coming from people who want to do more of their art, and that requires money, and many of them have been tricked into exposure rather than payment and that leads to them not doing more art because they're too busy with other stuff that does pay so they can live. It's a time bomb that isn't generally recognized until it explodes, and it almost always does, and then they care deeply and go looking for legal teeth. Exposure can be great. It's overwhelmingly exploited by companies that are capable of paying but choose not to. Changing that is why licenses have terms like this, otherwise what's the point of the license? Make it Public Domain.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      >tricked into exposure rather than payment Fully agree. In a prior stint as an IT industry analyst, we eventually started a non-paywall blog and (rarely) did free appearances at industry conferences. But people tried to get us to do free stuff all the time for the "exposure." Especially starting out it can be really tempting. But you have to really keep it in check if you're running a business. >Seems like that "remix, please attribute" is just signaling intent, and then there's no need for a license dictating how violations are handled. Viewed from the distance of 20ish years the CC licenses (other than CC0) look way too complicated. And it's not like CC works are routinely credited, even if imperfectly, anyway. It's not even clear to me that the MIT license couldn't just have been used (or extended) for non-code use.

pdonis 3y ago

> if you wanted to just allow reuse we have a fantastically well-tread license for that - Public Domain Public Domain isn't a license. It's a problematic legal concept. It's not clear whether you actually can place something into the public domain if it isn't in there automatically (for example being published pre-1922). Sure, you can say "I place this work in the public domain", but will that actually have the legal effect you want? Basically you are saying you relinquish ownership of the work, but if you don't own it, you can't claim to control what other people do with it--including claiming ownership of it under other legal concepts, such as the concept of "abandoned property"--if you find something lying around and nobody else claims ownership of it, you can. "Public Domain" gives no shield whatever against such shenanigans.

Groxx 3y ago
>Public Domain isn't a license. It's a problematic legal concept. ... Fair. I'll keep that in mind and try to find details for the future :) >[Under public domain] you can't claim to control what other people do with it Which is exactly what CC without actual legal threats achieves, yes. Which is why I say people do care, so making it toothless seems to defeat the point. As far as I'm aware, the rest of that (mostly ownership) is covered by copyright, which is applied by default if you say nothing. So: saying nothing and distributing it however you like already achieves more than CC-without-teeth because you can already sue people for using it or claiming it as theirs, and just choose not to. Which is why this whole change feels self-defeating to me.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > copyright, which is applied by default if you say nothing But does not allow reuse. So it's irrelevant to a discussion of what to do if you do want to allow reuse. > you can already sue people for using it or claiming it as theirs, and just choose not to But that puts anyone who wants to reuse your content in good faith at the mercy of your whim about whether or not to sue them. That is not a good basis for facilitating reuse. > this whole change feels self-defeating to me Meaning, fixing the attribution clauses in CC so that people have a reasonable time to cure violations before the $150K lawsuit threat? I don't see how that makes CC licenses any more or less "toothless" than they were before. It increases the difficulty of copyleft trolling, which was what it was intended to do. Yes, it means a 30 day delay after you give notice before you can sue someone for violating your license--but anyone who fixes the violation within 30 days of you giving them notice is not someone you want to sue anyway, because they're a good faith user. If we're talking about individuals or small businesses, what makes any license toothless in our current legal environment is the cost of a lawsuit. If you're an individual or small business and large corporation X reuses your content without meeting the terms of your license, whether it's the original CC or the current one, and refuses to fix the violation (presumably because it would be bad for their business), you're basically SOL anyway: you will run out of money to keep a lawsuit going long before corporation X runs out of legal devices to delay or obstruct you. No amount of rejiggering of a license is going to change that. Nor, for that matter, will not giving any license and relying on copyright law: you're still in the same position.