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.
