Creative Commons

The current versions of the CC licenses are subject to increasing criticism from the free software community, because of

• the great number of different and incompatible licenses (see Richard Stallman's critique)

• the lack of a minimum standard of information freedom in the CC licenses (see Richard Stallman's and Benjamin Mako Hill's critiques)

• incompatibility to the GNU Free Documentation License (used by Wikipedia)

• details which make all CC licenses fail the minimum criteria of free/open source licenses according to the Debian project.

Creative Commons has announced new versions of its licenses with some respective improvements. It would be interesting to hear more about that at WOS.

Possible Speakers

• Representatives of Creative Commons
• Benjamin Mako Hill

Material

• The License FAQ of the Free Software Foundation about the Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike License: "There is literally no specific freedom that all Creative Commons licenses grant. Therefore, to say that a work 'uses a Creative Commons license' is to leave all important questions about the work's licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement, please suggest making it clearer. And if someone proposes to 'use a Creative Commons license' for a certain work, it is vital to ask immediately 'Which one?' We recommend using the Free Art License, rather than this one, so as to avoid augmenting the problem caused by the vagueness of 'a Creative Commons license'".

• Benjamin Mako Hill's critique of Creative Commons

• Richard Stallman's critique of Creative Commons

• Debian's critique of Creative Commons

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