CZ:License Essays/Peter Tretter

The wonderful thing about licenses.

By Peter Tretter

I'm a big fan of copyleft. I think that the way copyright is treated is far too sterile, and litigious. In a digital world, sharing of information should be easier done, with less egg-shell walking as information goes beyond national borders, and even our own minds.

I've used the creative commons previously. I've seen the GNU free documentation license on Wikipedia. Frankly, the GNU free documentation license scares me. Mainly because I don't understand it, and nothing I find on it clarifies anything. I have no idea how it works, or how to implement it if I want to use content. The Creative Commons, however, has easy human-readble licenses that tell you exactly what you can and cannot do with the content.

So from the start, I favour the Creative Commons.

Commerical or not commercial?

I'm on the more conservative side of this. I prefer things to be non-commercial. When I write something, or offer it up, I want people to pay for it if they're going to make money off of my work. It's only fair. I put the time into creating it, why should Steve Jobs, for example, get rich off my picture of the CN Tower, for example? Fair pay for fair work.

Mike Johnson brings up the point that if you make it non-commercial, people will sometimes have to ask to use it, and then they won't ask at all. I say if they have to ask, it's probably commercial, and they should be paying for the material.

My recommendation

At the end of the day, I'm here to contribute to something around the idea of an encylopedia. I don't really want to have to worry about weather or not my material is being used to make millions of dollars off. The Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license is the best way to go.