The FSF Allows No Derivatives, And That's A Mistake
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I wrote an essay with my thoughts on the FSF's insistence on using no-derivatives licenses such as CC BY-ND:
http://onpon4.comule.com/other/fsf-no-derivatives
Summary: it's the one huge thing I completely disagree with the FSF about.
I am a member!
Dymitri Kleiner wrote The Telecommunist Manifesto which you may find interesting if you have not read it. He speaks about CC (esp. CC BY-ND) as copyjustright, as opposed to what he calls copyfarleft. Thank you for linking to your article, I will read it tomorrow.
Hello onpon4,
I read your essay very carefully, but I don't come to the same conclusion like you.
Your pointed out lots of cases in which using a derivative-allowing licence would benefit the original work. Nobody denies that this is true.
Your essay is a bit weak when it comes to the point of explaining why the disadvantages of such licences are not bad at all.
One of your few arguments here is that people can already be misrepresented by journalists who only broadcast some parts of an interview.
But I think it's a weak argument saying: look, bad things already happen, let's make it easier for even more.
In my point of view, distorting an interview person like that is bad, but if we want to have interviews to exist, this conflict can't be solved any better. So it is rather a compromis than a good solution.
Now when it comes to the point of the benefits of derivativs like translations and how
they can spread the word:
Considering statistics, it is very likely that some misrepresentation will happen.
The question is: what is the lesser evil?
Some people don't having any translation they can read or
some people reading a false version of it which teaches them badly.
In my point of view, second one is a bigger problem. The first one hinders the spreading of the idea.
A man in a country asks: "What do you think about the gnu manifesto?".
First answer: "I haven't read it, there is no translation." - people won't get a negative impression.
Second answer: "Oh, it's crap and nothing more". the impression due to the bad translation.
The last point I want to talk about is the idea of a completely free culture in general:
Allowing everything to be copied and changed has advantages and disadvantages.
When we're talking about work with a practical use, like software, we can look at how society has
developed and this is really a good reason for the necessity of free software.
Quite similar with art.
But how do you come to the
conclusion that opinions have to be free at all? They never were in a general sense and they are already
in a specific way.
You have every right to take someones opinion, apply changes on it and then release it - under your own opinion!
So I think opinions are already free in the most important way.
Comparing this with Art goes like this: It's sufficient to be able to take beethovens music, change it and use it for my own music which
I release under my name. It's not necessary to change the music of beethoven and release it under his name.
> Your pointed out lots of cases in which using a derivative-allowing licence would benefit the original work. Nobody denies that this is true.... But I think it's a weak argument saying: look, bad things already happen, let's make it easier for even more.
That's not quite what my argument is. My argument is that not allowing derivatives doesn't actually prevent the problem.
> Considering statistics, it is very likely that some misrepresentation will happen.
> The question is: what is the lesser evil?
> Some people don't having any translation they can read or
> some people reading a false version of it which teaches them badly.
> In my point of view, second one is a bigger problem.
That's an interesting practical problem with bad translations, but how are crappy translations different from, say, crappy ports of free software? Obviously, a crappy port gives people who use that port a bad impression of the software and perhaps free software in general, but we don't restrict people's freedom to stop this. The software would then be proprietary.
And then there's another problem with this idea: it's perfectly possible for people, without infringing copyright, to just very badly paraphrase what the FSF is all about. And... well, people do that, all the time. Just look at how many people refer to the GNU GPL as "viral", call free software "communist" or "socialist", or even claim that free software is about open source software that is free of charge.
> Comparing this with Art goes like this: It's sufficient to be able to take beethovens music, change it and use it for my own music which
> I release under my name. It's not necessary to change the music of beethoven and release it under his name.
that wouldn't be a no-derivatives license, now would it? That would be a free license that requires you to NOT attribute the modified work to the original author. If some paranoid nut wants to have this requirement, that's fine. But the FSF's stance is currently "we're paranoid, so we're not going to let you modify our works", and that is what I'm against.
"that wouldn't be a no-derivatives license, now would it? That would be a free license that requires you to NOT attribute the modified work to the original author."
Maybe I should explain a bit more:
If RMS writes an essay in which he says:
Title: "Me and software" content: "I think everyone should use free software" - by rms
you are free to take his opinion and make it to yours; you can write an essay like this:
"I think everyone should use free software but shouldn't use non-derivative licences" - by onpon4
You took his opinion and made it your own opinion; there is no need to give credit to anyone. Just like someone uses beethovens music, applies changes and distributes it under his name. This is perfectly allowed at the moment, nobody can prevent you from this.
The no-derivative licence prevents you from writing an article like
Title: "Me and software" content: "I think everyone should use open source software." - by rms.
Changing his opinion and still releasing it as HIS opinion.
This not what happens to beethoven if you use his completely free licence.
I hope I could explain why I consider opinions being sufficiently free even with no-derivative licences.
You're mixing up ideas, public domain creative works, and copyrighted creative works. That's a problem.
An opinion itself is just an idea, not a creative work. It can't be copyrighted. But an expression of an opinion, such as an essay or a talk, is treated as a creative work and can be copyrighted.
You say that it's possible to make changes to Beethoven's music, and that's true, but this is only because his works are in the public domain. The FSF's works expressing opinion are not in the public domain; they're copyrighted, and will continue to be copyrighted probably for the rest of our respective lives.
The examples you gave to try to demonstrate the FSF's position are far too small to be copyrighted. We need to take a much larger work and try to apply changes to it for the example to make sense. For example, take https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and replace every occurrence of the word "free software" with "libre software". This example is illegal. It's a derivative work, and it stays a derivative work whether I attribute it to the FSF or to myself. Of course, if I attribute it to myself, that would be a violation of another part of CC BY-ND, the attribution requirement.
Of course I can use the *idea* of the Free Software Definition to write my own Libre Software Definition; that's basically what the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition are. But derivatives of existing works of opinion are much easier to make than entirely new works expressing the same opinion, and they're less redundant at the same time. I think this argument is like saying that proprietary software whose source code is publicly available is fine because nothing is stopping you from writing a new program that does the same thing as the proprietary program.
I know what you mean, but the problem is:
you can't allow the expression of an idea to be changed without the risk that the idea itself will get changed in practice. And furthermore in analogy to art and how derivatives are allowed under free licences, you would have to clarify that it's *your* expression of their idea; claiming that they wrote an essay like they never did is wrong - it would be just a lie.
I tend to agree that you should be allowed to make a translation of an essay pointing out clearly that you changed how the idea is expressed and can't garantuee that the actual idea is still represented the right way.
But would I want to read such a translation written by anyone from the net?
Would such very unreliable works really benefit anyone?
I, as a reader, only *want* to read translations which are checked by the fsf since this is the only way I can be sure to understand them the right way.
I want to add this to my post above: we have to consider that an altered essay can get altered once again, and again, and again.
This reminds me to how rumors spread in rural regions.
Someone hears a story, tries to get it right but in fact changes it a little bit and tells his neighbour. The neighbour alters it a little bit, too, and tells his wife. This change goes on and on and on.
At the end of the day, the story will be totally different.
There exist so many people with different abilities... if the chain is long enough it comes down to pure statistics and it's almost sure that the original idea will be misrepresented to some extent.
We already have that without people modifying whole opinion pieces; just look at the many, many people who have been misquoted. I suppose this type of activity sometimes leads to someone being perceived wrongly, but I'm not aware of any cases. It's very rare. More usually, it's a deliberate attempt to misrepresent someone, such as quote-mining or simple lying, that causes people to be perceived wrongly. Copyright doesn't prevent this.
It happens to RMS, too. Remember the Linux Action Show episode where one of them went on and on about how RMS hates children and supports pedophilia? All it took was twisting what he said in his interview and exaggerating a comment he made on his website.
Misinterpretation and selective quoting are one thing - bad re-expression of written opinions another. They do harm in different ways.
First one is mainly done by people who want to hurt you, second one is mainly done by people who want to help you.
It's a well known fact that people should be careful with media and how people are represented there. Linux Action Show throws dirt at rms? I think many people remain critical and want to read things stallman really wrote himself - like his essays.
If *they* contain mistakes and crazy assumptions he never made, then this is far worse than bad publicity in an unimporant show on youtube because people rely on this two words "by rms".
Hi onpon4. Let's imagine an alternate reality:
The GNU project begins and after some years the GNU OS is complete with the Hurd kernel. There's no such thing as the Linux kernel, "Linux", "open source", BSDs, the open source movement.
Slowly the world starts understanding and falling in love with the GNU philosophy and the GNU OS/various distros spread more and more.
Somewhere along the way comes the free culture movement.
We're now in the present and more than 90% of the software produced and used worldwide is free software.
Schools everywhere only use free software and teach the GNU principles.
Richard Stallman is a very happy man. He can say that the world understood his message and embraced his ideas
regarding software freedom. He starts thinking that maybe the FSF can stop using the no-derivatives licenses for their works of opinion...
I did investigating after someone on Diaspora suggested that the attribution portion of the CC licenses might already cover this. Here's what I found, in section 4.b of CC BY 3.0:
> If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or
> Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section
> 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable
> to the medium or means You are utilizing... (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author").
Further down in that same section:
> You may only use the credit required by this Section for the purpose of
> attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under
> this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any
> connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor
> and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work,
> without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original
> Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties.
In short: if you make an Adaptation (defined to include, among other things, derivative works and translations), you are required to say somewhere how you are using the work, and you're not allowed to assert or imply that the original author endorses your modification. This applies to all current CC licenses with the attribution requirement (excluding CC0), including CC BY and CC BY-SA. I wasn't previously aware of this, and it makes the FSF and Stallman's fear even sillier.
I still doubt that this kind of works (someone tried to somehow express the thoughts of someone else) will be so useful...
But it's true, they dont to any harm and maybe they should be allowed by fsf.
Is this why Debian considers the GNU FDL as nonfree?
"Invariant sections" make GNU FDL-licensed documentation non-free as far as Debian is concerned, yes (and personally, I completely agree with that assessment). The Debian project has had another problem with the FDL, and that is the clause which is supposed to prevent you from distributing FDL-licensed documentation with DRM (the Debian developers thought it's too vague and can cover simple encryption or just having a copy on your own computer in a DRM-encumbered format), though I don't know if this is still a concern of the Debian developers.
I think there can be official translations (accepted by the FSF) and some non-official translations. After all, the FSF can translate his own articles/pdf in many languages. Then, everyone can do his own translations. And we will know that the official translations (accepted by the FSF) are on the officiel website of the FSF.
The FSF can express his ideas by himself, and translating them. I suppose that there are multilingual people in the FSF. Who can stop the FSF ? LOL
So, I think it's not necessary to limit the sharing with restrictive clauses. In my opinion, we have to use the restrictive clauses as less as possible. Ideally, CC-BY or CC0. Let's use licences that give users as few obligations and prohibitions as possible.
The non-derivative clause prevents the correction of orthograph, the free and non-official translation, or any didactical/pedagogical adaptation. It prevents hacking, and we love hacking, we do it daily (for example when put pears instead of apples in a recipe, when we interpret a song, etc.).
One possibility is to put some works under a licence, some others under another licence, etc. The FSF can use different licences. We, too. I think one mistake is too think that one licence is enough or perfect. The diversity of licences is a form of freedom. Diversity is a necessary condition to freedom. There is the FSF, but there is also April, La Quadrature du Net, etc.
The debate about to put the clause SA or not seems, from my point of view, to look like the debate between GNU-GPL and BSD. Of course, there are some differences. A software is more complicated than a file ; a software is different from its source code.
Let's trust people. Let's share information, knowledge and know-how.
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