COPYCENSE

“Creative Commons has taken over the world of online publishing, in two years generating over 20 million linkbacks to the Creative Commons license pages. But so far it’s been pretty much a pointless exercise, for all the linkbacks and creative commons buttons out there, a miniscule fraction of the additional rights offered by the Creative Commons licenses are actually being put to use.

“The problem is that Creative Commons licenses have been custom tailored to appeal to the random whims of publishers with no regard for consumers of the commons content. If you read Creative Commons material, it carefully emphasizes that Creative Commons is about creating tools for publishers, not creating free content for people to re-use. In this sense, ‘Creative Commons’ is a misnomer, for the definition of a ‘Commons’ is ‘mutual good, shared by more than one,’ not ‘an entanglement of vaguely defined rights and restrictions.'”

Alex Bosworth’s Weblog. Creative Commons Is Broken. Source Labs. Feb. 21, 2006.

See also:

Lawrence Liang. A Guide To Open Content Licences. December 2004.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.