The Fragmentation of Creative Commons

Evan posted yesterday his observations on the fragmentation of CC licenses:

"It's hard enough already for people to grok that there's more than one CC license. That there's 11... no, plus the Public Domain dedication... and then the Sampling... don't forget Founders' Copyright... plus these iCommons things... and what's this CC-GPL about?... oh and now the Music Sharing license [...] The Sampling license is not the license that allows you to sample music; it's the license that just allows you to sample music. The Music Sharing License is not the license that allows you to share music; it's the license that just allows you to share music."

These are similar concerns that I've felt about CC -- that their licenses are frequently unclear, that licensing decisions can be changed, that ultimately many CC licenses don't accomplish some of the core goals that CC seems to stand for. Don't get me wrong: I love CC's vision and mission even if I don't agree with the community on every point. Some of the license combinations seem counter-intuitive to me (for example, I'm always depressed when see "non-commercial only" restrictions -- that seems like such an arbitrary decision, since most of my sites would likely be considered "commercial" despite being independent and collaborative in spirit.)

Greg London responded by arguing that part of the confusion is not recognizing that Creative Commons are about a gift economy:

Others, like Rob Meyers, think instead that this is about "defensive copyrighting":

I think Rob doesn't quite understand the breadth of how people use "big C" copyrights currently. If you really wanted to make sure that your work's use wasn't limited, you could make it public domain. But instead, most CC licenses are in fact still very much about limiting use -- just not limiting as much as traditional copyrights.

"Big C" copyrights aren't necessarily a "don't touch any of this or we'll sue you" -- they might just be a "contact me if you want to do something with this work". If Creative Commons could provide a clear way to say "contact me if you want to do something other than this list of things I say you can do upfront", then it's streamlining the existing network of collaboration. When Madstone Theaters asked if they could reprint 3 articles a year from indieWIRE in their email newsletter, I was able to ask for particular kind of recognition and get it (extending our brand a little bit as well.) If instead it had been a by-nc-dc license I would have been telling Madstone upfront that their commercial status might mean I'd be pre-disposed to not allowing that. So they contacted us, and we found a compromise that represented a win-win for both us (and didn't involve any cash at all.)

I consider every single copyright I've ever had as defensive -- as something that we can use to stop a horrible usage (say, plagurism) but don't have to aggressively pursue in cases where it's fan usage or non-competitive derivative works. The nice thing about copyrights, unlike trademarks, is that they aren't diluted if they aren't enforced every single time.

Greg London expressed disastifaction even with the way CC uses the phrase and ideology of the "commons", at least from the view of gift economy:

All of this discussion is good: good for the Web, good from Creative Commons, good for the free culture movement, and good for independents who have liberal ideas about what they want to do with their work. But if CC licenses become too confusing, diverse and recombant for people to understand (which is probably the case -- traditional copyrights still seem difficult for many on the Web to understand) then "all rights reserved reasonably, contact for details" might be the Occam's razor addition to "all rights reserved unreasonably" and "public domain gift".