Thanks to Justin, he forwarded me a brilliant presentation by Lessig on Free culture. I loved it, got inspired and then thought that i should also contribute in my own way. So i have signed up for Creative Common license.
I have a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alikelicense meaning
(0) Its free.
(1) Anyone who uses my work has to attribute.
(2) It is for non-commercial purposes.
(3) And if you share or add to it you have to use the same license.
We do not think about these small things but there are always agents taking our freedom away from us. First, there are patents/copyrights against which i had blogged earlier. Then there are these rating organizations like MPAA or Censor board in India who have their own way. Few days ago comcast was controllong airwaves by banning torrent sites. Since they are ISP they were controlling what flows through their pipes but recently supreme court put an end to it.
Now also, there are hundred of such things. GNU made a big break through and now its creative common which is taking it to the next level.
2 comments:
It is good to see a license for this website. I could see one problem with clause 2.
Eventhough you licensed it under Creative Common License, still it is copyrighted by you. i.e., you can change the license at any time you want. However, you cannot revoke the license from the people/entities who got this work under this license. Suppose, if some body else takes your content, and modifies little bit, and releases it, then both will get the copyright on the modified content. And if many people modifies that, then there will be many copyright holders of the final content.
Now, if I want to take that content for commerical purposes, the only way is, talk to all the copyright holders and convince them to license under my terms for some royalty. There is no other way to do this. Even if one person rejects, I can never use that content for commerical purposes. It will be very hard to go and talk to all the copyright holders, and even then there is no guarantee that I will get the license, even after paying the royalty. In my opinion, this is not freedom.
Even if we take simple case, like publishing your article in any news paper, it would be considered as commerical. So, the journalist or the editor has to request you for licensing in different terms and only after you grant the license in different terms for that news paper, they can publish it. I don't think anybody will take the pain, unless it is of a celebrity like Ambitabh Bachan or Ram Gopal Varma. With this license, you are not allowing any news paper to publish it.
Of course, this is your own content, and you have all the rights to dictate all the terms. I have just described few problems with this license as a user, and nothing more than that.
By the way, I hate GPL, and my license is similar to BSD, except for one clause (translation to different languages will also be in the same license).
Thanks Satish for your comment. It was informative. specially the log4j example.
But there is also an other side. There are somethings which should not go into commercial domain. For example i agree that by the copyright chosen by me, it makes it difficult for people to publish in a newspaper. But journalists are paid fixed wages. What if someone copies it and puts into his book (with attribution). Someone may sell a book titled "100 worst articles over web" and will put my article and make money out of it. I would not want that.
I guess both the license without commercial intent(GPL) and with commercial intent(LGPL) stand there at their own place and it depends on people to people how they want to treat their work.
Since i am not writing to make money, i would not want anyone to make money but as far as sharing stuff goes, all mediums are fine.
But again, thanks. it was nice to know the finer difference.
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