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FSF - Fireworks in Montreal (2005-07-01 to 2005-07-05)
by dmv at 3:18 pm EDT, Sep 21, 2005 |
After the speech, there was a panel discussion which included me and a Canadian lawyer representing Creative Commons. I used to support Creative Commons, but then it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom, and now I can no longer endorse it as an activity. (I agree with Mako Hill that they are taking the wrong approach by not insisting on any specific freedoms for the public--see http://mako.cc/writing/toward_a_standard_of_freedom.html--but I go a little further: I don't think that licenses which deny that minimum freedom are legitimate at all.) Since people tend to treat Creative Commons as a unit, disregarding the details like which one of their licenses is being used, it is not feasible to support just part of Creative Commons--so I can't support it at all now. I asked the leaders of Creative Commons privately to change their policies, but they declined, so we had to part ways. I explained this briefly, in words were no harsher than the ones above. So I was rather shocked by how the lawyer from Creative Commons responded. After leading the audience in a simplistic game, designed for them to choose his position over a single other option, he then accused me of acting like a fascist ruler, claiming that I was trying to command the audience to agree with me. I responded calmly, explaining the difference between stating a political position and forcing people to agree, and quite pleasantly did not even get angry. The audience, aware I had done nothing to interfere with their freedom of thought or speech, was not very sympathetic to him. Immediately after the panel ended, he did the strangest thing: he came up to shake my hand.
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RE: FSF - Fireworks in Montreal (2005-07-01 to 2005-07-05)
by Decius at 5:59 pm EDT, Sep 21, 2005 |
Immediately after the panel ended, he did the strangest thing: he came up to shake my hand.
Further evidence that the FSF people are crazy? CC allows people an easy way to reserve less rights. The trouble is that people don't understand what CC is, and people are slapping CC licenses on works that they would otherwise place in the public domain simply because they think CC is hip, which actually reduces the scope of the public domain. I think he has a point there. But to go further and oppose what CC is doing is silly. Essential rights ARE unreservable! The debate is over what rights are essential, and that debate is a matter of copyright law and not of licenses. What CC AND FSF allow you to do is choose a license in which nonessential rights aren't reserved. Turning this into an anti-copyright political movement is at best premature. Does FSF propose that the right to redistribute someone elses work is an essential right that ought to be constitutionally protected? If so they need to solve the tremendous economic questions that such an essential right would create. This is more then just creating a movement, and so far the arguements for how you eat bits have been falicious. (No one makes money selling GNU licensed software. Some people make money supporting it, but you don't provide technical support for a sound recording so this is not a universal solution. Stock is not income, (ehm!). Its not really free as in beer if someone paid for the development with a grant (EHM!).) I support the effort to look at these problems but taking a dogmatic stance is not constructive. You are not going to see a political movement until you figure out how things are going to work once that movement is successful. |
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