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Doc, please think a third time
Doc, I noticed your post http://doc-weblogs.com/2006/08/28 where you switch from a Public Domain Dedication to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. I suppose that your posts prior to August 28th, 2006, remain in the Public Domain as according to the terms of the Dedication. Although, in practice that's awkward to assert as, ultimately, you're the author and you have, in reality, the moral right to change your mind to the extent that it is possible for others to accomodate you. Which shows that the hard legal edge of the Public Domain Dedication ("irrevocable" as written up by the Creative Commons) doesn't make sense and is, I think, counterproductive. I just want to point out that your choice of a "ShareAlike" license is really incompatible with the Public Domain. By including your post in full, my letter is by your terms required to likewise be "ShareAlike". Which is to say, it rules out that the rest of my letter can be in the Public Domain. "If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one." Amazingly, your chosen license is incompatible with "Public Domain except as noted" because it doesn't allow itself to be considered as an exception. It doesn't stop there. Any archive that my letter enters (even minus your quote!) becomes subject to the "ShareAlike" license. Any wiki or website likewise becomes. Any moderator of a discussion group or administrator of a wiki is obliged to delete any such letter or be held accountable to its terms. Any person with an Inbox is likewise accountable. So you're clearing the way for a new kind of spam which would set it's own terms for any collection of content. Basically, your license's goal, perhaps unintended, is to eliminate the possibility of genuine sharing from the face of the earth. We're born with a right to share, a right to give away, but we find ourselves in a system that rules out that possibility, that insists that everything we create is copyright and that we or somebody must own it. Your license assumes and reenforces this mindset. It's a legal mindset and it accomodates systems, rather than a moral mindset which accomodates human beings by allowing that we can grow, change our minds and be inconsistent. A moral mindset to sharing would be, How can we all share paid work? Getting paid work is much more relevant than any dinky revenues or donations from content. Our ability to share in our current society comes down to our ability to share paid work. How open and sharing are we about that? Your license actually rules out matters of sustainability by restricting use to "non-commercial". How are we supposed to be sustainable if we're not allowed to profit? And how can we have a sustainable commons if everything has to be marked up as to who originated it, who built on it, what were their terms and whims? Indeed, what can be "common" if it all has to be "attributed"? Not only are you insisting on this for your own work, but on everybody else's! Or you're asking anybody else to live on the other side of the freeway. Segregation finds it's lasting home in cyberspace. There's the country club of people who can afford to play golf because they have money or know money or get money or spend money to be part of that club. And everybody else gets to watch. Would I encourage them to invest themselves in such a "commons"? No!!!! And your reason for doing all of this is that you want to fight spammers who are gaming the system with splogs. A system that you yourself aren't happy to live in. Your priority seems to be supporting a Google ranking system which really doesn't serve humanity as such. I myself have put up thousands of ads for Google and never received a penny because before I reached my $100 threshhold I realized this is a stupid way to treat my community. Really, what is helpful is to show ads from our community members, especially those who are looking for work or offering services. If somebody can help me find one piece of work, that is worth much more than anything Google could ever offer. That's a much more real economy and a much more human one, too. And sharing content in the Public Domain is key to interconnecting the underlying community and distinguishing who are the people truly willing to share, truly in the commons. I thought you were. There is a small, but hopefully growing culture of people in the world who believe in the Public Domain because they truly believe in giving everything away. You were one of the very few people generous enough to have a blog in the Public Domain. (Flemming Funch is another one.) And there is a much more visible culture, exemplified by the Creative Commons, which "shares" by force of law, imposes terms, requires compliance, and phrases giving away as "no rights reserved" instead of "all permissions granted" or "you don't have to ask" or "use your best judgement". How much genuine "sharing" has the Creative Commons resulted in? How much reuse? What is the ratio, words to words, of the content used to specify terms, and the content that actually gets reused? And how much of that reuse actually complies with the terms? Is it fostering "giving away", is it growing the Public Domain? Whatever happened to the Public Domain at http://www.ibiblio.org ? the phrase doesn't even exist at their FAQ. One may note that the Creative Commons licenses claim explicitly that they don't restrict fair use. Yet in a court of law, I think it is common sense that fair use is naturally and properly restricted by any efforts by a publisher to clarify terms on usage. The more clearly the published work explains the limits on its use, the more reasonable is a strict interpretation of those limits. So, for example, a work that specifically allows for "non-commercial" usage will lead to a much more black and white interpretation about commercial use than if that clause weren't there. Fair use is, in practice, all about having a lot of gray areas. Regardless of what the licenses would like to say, by asserting "we allow for gray", they make us wonder "but is there any gray"? Alexander Kjerulf has the same license that you do. Recently, he blogged http://positivesharing.com/2006/07/selling-by-giving/ that the "best piece of business advice he'd ever received" came from my paper "An Economy for Giving Everything Away" http://www.ms.lt/en/workingopenly/givingaway.html He thought of it as "selling through giving". So I wrote him to explain that his license kept me from quoting him, as my work is in the Public Domain. He never replied. So where is the sharing? My experience is that people who require permission don't give it when asked. And that there is no civil justice relevant to my business because I don't have the means or the desire to fight in court. So why this emphasis on licenses? The Creative Commons has fostered more legal documents than any initiative that I know. And how many people have actually read the licenses they link to? Doc, if somebody as knowledgeable as you is willing to switch all the way from an "irrevocable" dedication to the Public Domain to a ShareAlike license which is more restrictive than plain vanilla copyright, all because of some anonymous automated spammers, then what does that say about the long term meaningfulness of these declarations? And who could possibly be as on top of things as you? I think the big question is, do we want to grow in moral sensitivity as humans, or do we want to grow in legal complexity as demons. The same people who make up the legalities are the same who say we don't have to follow them. And they are one with the gamemasters who say people are lawless, thieves, cheaters and the system needs to be set up with that in mind. The legalities are really only binding on the hypermoral people who actually feel obliged to see the truth and stick to it. These are the people who suffer. These are the people who show that a different system is needed and who will make it happen. Doc, please don't give up on the Public Domain! I think that you might stand out regarding this issue as you have, one of the handful of people with a blog in the Public Domain. I also encourage you to think how we might organize social networking of, by and for those people who do contribute to the Public Domain, so that they would help each other find work as needed and be free to contribute to a real commons as they are and when they can. I'm glad to pursue this at a forum that you think appropriate. Andrius Andrius Kulikauskas Minciu Sodas http://www.ms.lt ms@ms.lt +370 (699) 30003 Vilnius, Lithuania There are responses to this message:
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