{"id":262,"date":"2005-03-25T19:45:30","date_gmt":"2005-03-26T00:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/creative_commons"},"modified":"2005-03-25T19:45:30","modified_gmt":"2005-03-26T00:45:30","slug":"creative_commons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2005\/03\/creative_commons.html","title":{"rendered":"Creative Commons"},"content":{"rendered":"

I discovered the other day that Yahoo! has launched a Creative Commons Search<\/a>. Nifty stuff! I am pleased to note that the goer.org HTML 4.01 Tutorial<\/a> is currently the #2 result for the search “html tutorial”<\/a>. This despite the fact that the tutorial isn’t finished, and was mostly written before I understood the difference between “tags” and “elements”. Hmmmm. I think the tutorial could use some spiffing up…<\/p>\n

In other Creative Commons-related news: via Tim Bray<\/a> I discovered a curious statement from Bob Wyman, who claims that the Creative Commons “non-commercial” license does not actually do anything to prevent commercial use<\/a>. Wyman’s reasoning is:<\/p>\n

\n

Given the notes on the Creative Commons site, and a closer reading of the Creative Commons licenses themselves, it seems like what is being said by the CC “NonCommercial” license is not that commercial use is denied, but rather that non-commercial use is permitted. The focus is on what is permitted, not what is denied.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

First, as far as I can tell, the text of the NonCommercial License explicitly states<\/a> that commercial usage is prohibited: “Noncommercial.<\/strong> You may not use this work for commercial purposes.” Legal jargon is tricky, and designed to trip up non-lawyers and rubes such as ourselves. That said, I am not sure how a “closer reading” would come to some other conclusion.<\/p>\n

Second, let’s imagine we live in a universe where the NonCommercial license didn’t<\/em> say “you may not use this work for commercial purposes.” Let’s say it said, “You may use this work for non-commercial purposes” instead. I don’t see how this would make any difference. By default, you cannot take my copyrighted material without my permission and use it for either A) non-commercial or B) commercial purposes (modulo fair use and parody considerations). If I then subsequently grant you permission to use some of my copyrighted material for A), that doesn’t mean you are suddenly granted permission to use it for B) also. Unless B) is a subset of A). Which it isn’t, at least if I understand the English prefix, “non-“.<\/p>\n

Or am I missing something? I am not a lawyer. Then again, as far as I can tell, neither is Bob. Creative Commons licenses might have other structural problems<\/a>, but I don’t see how this particular issue is one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Legal jargon is tricky, and designed to trip up non-lawyers and rubes such as ourselves. That said, I am not sure how a “closer reading” would come to some other conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}