Upgrade to CC-BY(-(NC(-(ND|SA))?|ND|SA))?-4\.0

Today Creative Commons released version 4.0 of six* of its licenses, with many improvements over version 3.0, after more than two years of work. I’ll write more about those details later. But you should skip right past 4.0 and upgrade to CC’s premier legal product, CC0. This is the case whether you’re looking to adopt a CC license for the first time, or to upgrade from version 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 2.5, or 3.0.

Let’s review the named conditions present in some or all of the CC 4.0 licenses, and why unconditional CC0 is better.

Don’t forget unmitigated © in the basement.

Attribution (BY). Do not take part in the debasement of attribution, and more broadly, provenance, already useful to readers, communities of practice, and publishers, by making them seem mere objects of copyright license compliance. If attribution is useful, it will be provided. If not, robots will find out. Rarely does anyone comply with the exact legal requirements of the attribution term anyway, and as a licensor, you probably won’t provide the information needed by licensees to easily comply. Plus, the corresponding icon looks like a men’s bathroom sign.

NonCommercial (NC). Sounds nice, but nobody knows what it means. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why NC licensed works are often used by for-profit entities, including with advertising, while NC licensed works are verboten for many community and non-profit projects, most prominently Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. (Because commercial entities know there is very low risk of being sued for non-compliance, and can manage risk, while community projects tend to draw and follow bright lines. Perhaps community projects ought to be able to manage risk, and that they can’t is a demonstration of their relative lack of institutional sophistication…but that’s another topic!)

NoDerivatives (ND). This term has no business being in the “Creative Commons” license suite, but sadly still is. If you don’t want to contribute to a creative commons, don’t. If you’d like to, but think copyright (through withholding permission to share adaptations, i.e., the ND term) will prevent people from misrepresenting you, you’re wrong, committing an act of hate toward free speech, and undermining the potential of voluntary license practice to align with and support an obvious baseline objective for copyright reform: noncommercial sharing and remix should always be legal.

ShareAlike (SA). Also sounds nice, and I am a frequent apologist and sometime advocate for the underlying idea, copyleft. But SA is a weak implementation of copyleft. It isn’t “triggered” by the most common use of CC-licensed material (contextual illustration, not full remix), and it has no regulatory condition not present in non-SA CC licenses (cf GPL, which requires sharing source for a work, and is usable for any work; if you care about copyleft, tell CC to finish making CC-BY-SA one-way compatible with GPL). And the SA implementation retains the costs of copyleft: blank stares of incomprehension, even from people who have worked in the “open” world for over a decade, and occasionally intense fear and dislike (the balance is a bit different in the software world, but this is my direct experience among non-software putatively open organizations and people); also, compatibility problems. It’s time to take the unsolicited advice often given to incumbents and others fearful of the internet: ‘obscurity is a greater threat than piracy’ — and apply it: ‘obscurity is a greater threat than proprietarization.’


Upgrade to CC0!

CC0 isn’t perfect, but it is by far the best tool provided by CC. I have zero insight into the future of the CC organization, but I hope it gives ample priority to the public domain, post-4.0 launch.

*CC-BY(-(NC(-(ND|SA))?|ND|SA))?-4\.0 is a regular expression matching all six licenses released today.

17 Responses

  1. Anthony says:

    WTF.,.. You’re advocating that people should pass up their rights to be even attributed for their efforts? What kind of an Open Access zealot are you? No – let me answer that – the worst kind.

  2. Anthony.,.. What harms have people who have used CC0 or other maximally permissive/public domain instruments thus far? What harms would come if many more did, say a substantial number of the people currently using CC-BY* licenses?

  3. David says:

    Completely agree. Lawyers panic over public domain, but generally this provides the best for all parties. In the software world, one only has to look to sqlite for an example where public domain licensing has worked beautifully.

  4. Thanks David. As you mention software, I’ll add caveat that CC0 is not ideal for software due to its explicit patent reservation, discussed in the “not perfect” link above. There are some other options for public domain software, also mentioned at that link, including a custom declaration like sqlite’s, or the Unlicense. None of those options are absolutely perfect either, another reason why more innovation in public domain instruments is needed, also discussed a bit at that link.

  5. Jon Phillips says:

    Best post ever. Everything will be in the public domain in the end anyway, so it already is, we legal nerds are just in the way…

  6. […] …from Mike Linskvayer [at] http://gondwanaland.com […]

  7. […] CC0 is superior to any of the Creative Commons (CC) 4.0 licenses, because CC0 represents a superior policy (public domain). But if you’re unable or unwilling to upgrade to CC0, the CC 4.0 licenses are a great improvement over the 3.0 licenses. The people who did the work, led by Diane Peters (who also led CC0), many CC affiliates (several of whom were also crucial in making CC0 a success), and Sarah Pearson and Kat Walsh, deserve much praise. Bravo! […]

  8. […] of the first 11 Creative Commons licenses. Depending how one counts, there are now as few as 0, though 6 is probably the conventional answer (only current international versions of ones that […]

  9. […] the last, I recently urged all to upgrade to CC0 (a public domain dedication and license). Also, January 1 is a good date to […]

  10. […] been particularly persuaded by what Mike Linksvayer has been writing about CC0 and the whole suite of new CC licenses. At minimum, I’d like attribution, but who am I kidding? […]

  11. […] building and defending a robust public domain: sign the public domain manifesto, upgrade your work to the public domain, and enjoy and share the greatest public domain film to […]

  12. […] Some readers of my blog who have bizarrely read through this post, or skipped to the end, might enjoy Brinxmat’s Attribution licences for data and why you shouldn’t use them (another future issue report for LOV, which uses CC-BY?); I wrote a couple posts in the same blogversation; also a relevant upgrade exhortation. […]

  13. […] a huge fan of the public domain and think that among private opt-outs, public domain instruments ought be used much more than they are. Landley makes an interesting case (historical and otherwise, read his full post) for limiting […]

  14. […] release of CC0 last year (which makes it easy to renounce copyright) and Mike Linksvayer’s endorsement of it. Many thanks to Mike for his encouragement and advice, and thanks also to Pete Forsyth and Rebecca […]

  15. […] Lots of folks whom I admire have done so. Folks like Peter Saint-Andre and Nina Paley and Mike Linksvayer and Rick Falkvinge and the previously mentioned Zacqary Adam Green. There’s value in […]

  16. […] Posts on the ought of generative, networked production and intellectual parasite debasement of acknowledgement. […]

  17. […] months ago I railed against the attribution condition of some open and semi-open licenses (emphasis added): Do not take part in the debasement of attribution, and more broadly, provenance, […]

Leave a Reply