The Creative Commons license for me

After talking about Creative Commons licenses for a long while, I think that I’ll begin releasing most of my work under one in particular. It offers the best mix (for me) of extended and reserved rights, and would work better for people wanting to build upon my creative material, rather than just crassly exploiting it. Assuming anyone’s interested.  Now I just need to come up with a convenient, automated tagging scheme — more microformats — and how I want to be attributed, I’ll be ready.

The license? CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0

Comments, especially by those who already license their work this way, are welcome.

Published
Categorized as Open

By Scott Wells

Scott Wells, 46, is a Universalist Christian minister doing Universalist theology and church administration hacks in Washington, D.C.

5 comments

  1. Thanks for raising this issue online. We need a wider discussion in liberal religion about copyright vs. Creative Commons.

    Now, about my use of Creative Commons…. I release most of my online content via Creative Commons Attribution — Non-Commercial — No Derivatives 2.5 (I haven’t gone to 3.0 yet out of sheer laziness, but eventually I will update all copyright notices on my site). I used to claim full copyright on a few things, but not any more, because I don’t think full copyright really offers me much legal protection (I can’t afford a lawyer to pursue legal redress), and because I am so frustrated with the current ridiculous restrictions on copyright that I just don’t want to participate in it any more.

    As far as Creative Commons, I chose to go with “No Derivatives” only because I had nightmares about some fundamentalist group excerpting parts of my work and twisting the words in ways I did not like — while that has never happened with me with material from my Web site, it has happened with things I’ve posted on online forums, and I wanted some kind of legal recourse in such a situation. I don’t care about that so much any more, so when I finally upgrade to CC 3.0, I’ll change to a less restrictive license. In fact, when I post online videos, I already license them under the least restrictive Creative Commons 3.0 license.

  2. Several times I have been asked by people upon releasing readings of poems that I have written if it would be ok if they were shared in their place of work.

    For instance I have a friend who is a Social Worker for Hospice and they have staff meetings where they open with inspiring words and often do meditations and the she asked to use my meditation on women “She Guides Us”. Sometimes these meeting notes will get posted to the web.

    Click Here to read it (shameless plug)

    It is because of this that I opted for the BY-SA license and allow anything I write to be used for commercial purposes

  3. @Jamie.

    I got it.

    @Dan. I hear your concern about unfair manipulation of derived works. But if anyone uses anything I so license to mess with me, they will have had to use it — apart from fair use, which could be invoked even if I didn’t license it — under the Share Alike provision, which would give me some recourse to respond with what my adversary produced.

    Share Alike is important because it compells people who want to benefit from my generosity to be equally generous. Or put the other way, it allows generous people to draw from a larger group of peers.

  4. So far I’ve experimented with Creative Commons by posting most of my photos on Flickr with an Attribution-Noncommercial license. I’ve had pictures used by a state office of the ACLU, a French philosophy journal, a state historical society, and a couple of websites. (Or, at least, all of those groups found my pictures via Flickr and contacted me directly.)

    I haven’t released sermons, hymns, essays, or blog posts with a Creative Commons license yet. Then again, when asked, I’ve allowed others to redistribute and share them.

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