Is the ND in Creative Commons licenses reasonable?
Is the No-Derivatives part of Creative Commons licenses fair and reasonable?
I wouldn't mind if copyright were abolished altogether, and am disappointed that most of the articles on http://www.gnu.org are under the CC-BY-ND license.
Not only I think it is reasonable but I think it is better when we are talking about political articles like those rms writes. Would you like anybody to alter what rms writes in such articles?!
Just to be clear: I do not say the ND clause is better for rms. I say it is better for any political article (even those I strongly disagree with) because nobody should be allowed to alter the opinions of the author (attributed through the BY clause of the Creative Commons licenses).
Did you read this link?
http://questioncopyright.org/remix_stallman
I did. And, although I understand the intention (helping rms spread his message through a high-quality remix of his arguments), I still think that does not make a convincing argument against the ND clause.
Even with good intentions, it is very probable that rms does not approve the resulting mix because he thinks an essential part of his argumentation is missing or because he thinks the lack of a context makes a part ambiguous or because he thinks the remix emphasizes too much something he considers minor or because it is focusing too much on jokes, or on negative arguments, etc.
What if the authors of the remix promise not to distribute their work if not previously "approved by rms"? Well, in that case, the copyright license does not actually matter! Stallman can always grant a separate license to the authors of the remix he approves. The point is that it is undesirable to have a political speech altered *without* the consent of the one who expresses himself/herself because his/her opinion can be (voluntarily or not) misrepresented. The ND clause of the Creative Commons does exactly that.
And just to be clear: we are not talking about small excerpt (e.g., for journalism purposes). This is "fair use", i.e., the copyright license does not matter.
The ND prohibes the translations and, even, the correcture, doesn't it ?
The CC0 and CC-By are good for free sharing everything (music, science, stories, didactic tools, pictures, music sheet, pdf, ogg, ogv, odt, ods, etc.). Of course, without DRM.
This is the only major disagreement I have with the FSF. The FSF's position seems to be that culture licenses that prohibit modification are not only acceptable, but preferable in certain cases.
I think all culture should be free, too, not just software. I therefore also dislike the GNU Free Documentation License for its "invariant sections" option, and I don't use it. Currently I use a permissive license or CC0 for documentation that I write; I would actually prefer to use CC BY-SA, but I don't do that at the moment for GNU FDL compatibility. I might stop bothering with that and just use CC BY-SA in the future.
In fact, I think, ultimately, copyright ought to be abolished, so it would be hypocritical of me to advocate using that very law to put a restriction on culture out of fear of being "misrepresented".
No-derivatives licenses like CC BY-ND prevent plenty of useful and legitimate activities. Translation might be one of them, and making someone else's essay say your opinion is another. No, it's not malicious or illegitimate. Maybe I have a lot of agreements with what an essay said, but I want to cut out something that I think is a disgusting view so that I can share it with my peers without having to point out that I don't agree with that view.
Or maybe a talk just goes on and on, repeating the same things over and over again, and I want to make it better by cutting redundant parts out so that people watching it can just sit for 30 minutes instead of, say, 90 minutes, and get the good parts without having to sit through the crappy parts.
Or maybe there's a particularly good part that I want to cut out and share on its own. And I don't want to make a commentary on it so that I can claim "fair use".
And overall, these types of licenses make it harder to share them the way you want, and to understand what's legal and what's illegal. And for what? Because you're paranoid that some guy is going to lie about your views? He can do that without changing your work or even referring to your work at all.
ND doesn't match with the remix culture. ^^
I want users to be free to hack and change and share my creations. If I create a poem, I use words that I didn't create. If I make a table with wooden boards, I didn't make these boards. So, why to lose time and energy to search who is the author ? No restriction. Simply freedom, simply public domain (CC0).
Unfortunately, not enough people use CC0 and public domain. I have a dream : there are enough creations (music, arts, sciences, didactic tools, books, pdf, tutorials, etc.) so that everybody can live out of the market, so that missing money is not an obstacle to learn and share, so that money is just a short nightmare.
Personally, as long as copyright exists, I think copyleft licenses like CC BY-SA are useful for preventing non-free culture from having an advantage. If copyright is abolished and everything goes into the public domain, that will happen to works under CC BY-SA as well.
Now, by default, we have the "all rights reserved". Consequently, the sharer must actively put a liberating license (like CC0).
I am for the following idea : by default, a creation is in the public domain (no right reserved). And the "lockers" (people who want to limite free sharing) must actively put a "locking" license (like "all right reserved"...).
Imagine no copyright :
http://networkcultures.org/_uploads/tod/TOD4_nocopyright.pdf
Un monde sans copyright :