Archive for December, 2013

Blog indie radio static

Monday, December 23rd, 2013

If you still blog on your own site, read Jeffery Zeldman’s encomium and leave a comment.

As mentioned previously, the IndieWeb movement is bringing blog culture and technology forward. Watch Kevin Marks’ talk (slides).

Tantek Çelik is the person to follow, e.g., a recent post with essential history.

The IndieWeb movement is tiny. I’m merely a fan. WordPress (I use the software for this blog, but the wordpress.com service is at least as important) has done far more than any other entity/project to keep recognizable blogging relatively popular. For better or worse though, WordPress-based innovation seems to largely be in the direction of tackling various Content Management System problems, and following various trends in blog-like/competitor software/services, e.g., media sharing. Viewed in a really uncharitable light, wordpress.com is competing largely by bringing the features of a silo to blogging, rather than improving the technology and culture for independent website publishing/blogging. On the flipside, the ubiquity of WordPress probably makes it the most important software for further development of the IndieWeb.

On net the dominance of WordPress is probably good, but I also want to see more crazy blog/IndieWeb software, crazy meaning taking a very different approach rather than copying WordPress without its ecosystem. For example, remember the “bliki” concept? (Of course many implementations exist, ikiwiki being fairly popular, at least viewed through the lens of Planet Debian.) A few months ago there was a thread that touched on blogging within MediaWiki. Some of the posts (which I haven’t bothered to look up) said that MediaWiki makes commenting difficult. My reaction is that needs to be fixed anyway!

Another blog technology (and a bit of culture) development of note is use of a revision control system (usually git, usually public; wikis provide a facsimile of this; WordPress stores revisions, but those are never public and I find hard to use for anything other than a first tier backup/recovery) to write/manage/publish posts, usually associated with publishing a static site/blog. I find this compelling, but as far as I know IndieWeb/blog technology beyond feeds is underdeveloped for any static site generator (e.g., a popular one).

Jason Kottke recently wrote The blog is dead, long live the blog, which includes some bits I wasn’t fully aware of…about “social media”:

Twitter is coming to resemble radio news as media outlets repost the same stories throughout the day, ICYMI (in case you missed it).

The only mega-tweeter I follow (actually on pump.io) is Glyn Moody. I noticed Moody recently started reposting the same stories multiple times. I find this pretty annoying. Note I highly recommend following Moody; one of the few people I know of who follows closely and comments intelligently on all varieties of knowledge commoning (and beyond), something I find sorely lacking in the world. Fortunately Moody publishes his tweets for each day on a blog. So now I’m following him with a blog feed reader.

I have to imagine self-reposting and general “optimization” of tweeting will lead Twitter down the path Facebook has taken, ordering posts by “importance” rather than recency. Maybe that’d be good for readers, but grants the silos more power. IndieWebber Ben Werdmuller writes “in the future we can each have our own algorithms.” Hopefully.

I occasionally blog about blogging in my blogs category. As far as I know my would-be contribution to blog culture, self-refutation, has not been copied. I intend to add a variation, perhaps annual thematic doubt, which would be far less daunting than individual post refutation.

Greatest month in history?

Tuesday, December 17th, 2013

Yesterday, 11 years ago, today, 22 years and 4 months. Recently I noticed an observation in slides by Glyn Moody on Open Acccess (related editorial):

25 August 1991 – Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, announced the start of Linux
23 August 1991 – World Wide Web released publicly
14 August 1991 – Launch of arXiv

Moody titled the slide with above items “greatest week in history?” — arXiv is listed as 19 August, which I think must be a transcription error. Still, perhaps the greatest month in some assessment which grants something like knowledge commons supreme importance; perhaps future conventional wisdom. Those three are a nice mix of software, protocols, literature, data, and infrastructure.

collapsed broadcast towerThe world’s tallest broadcast tower collapsed 8 August 1991 to make way for somewhat less centralized communications.

Linux and the Web make Wikipedia’s short list of August 1991 events, which is dominated by the beginning of the final phase of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (I have an old post which is a tiny bit relevant to tying this all together, however unwarranted that may be.)

arXiv isn’t nearly as well known to the general public as Linux, which isn’t nearly as well known as the Web. In some ways arXiv is still ahead of its time. The future takes a long time to be distributed — Moody’s cover slide is titled “half a revolution”. Below I’ve excepted a few particularly enjoyable paragraphs and footnotes from It was twenty years ago today… by arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg (who, Moody notes, knew of GNU via a brother). I’ve bolded a couple phrases and added one link for additional entertainment value. The whole 9 page paper (PDF) is worth a quick read (I can’t help but notice and enjoy the complete absence of two words: “copyright” and “license”).

The exchange of completed manuscripts to personal contacts directly by email became more widespread, and ultimately led to distribution via larger email lists.13 The latter had the potential to correct a significant problem of unequal access in the existing paper-preprint distribution system. For purely practical reasons, authors at the time used to mail photocopies of their newly minted articles to only a small number of people. Those lower in the food chain relied on the beneficence of those on the A-list, and aspiring researchers at non-elite institutions were frequently out of the privileged loop entirely. This was a problematic situation, because, in principle, researchers prefer that their progress depends on working harder or on having some key insight, rather than on privileged access to essential materials.

By the spring of 1991, I had moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and for the first time had my own computer on my desk, a 25 MHz NeXTstation with a 105 Mb hard drive and 16 Mb of RAM. I was thus fully cognizant of the available disk and CPU resources, both substantially larger than on a shared mainframe, where users were typically allocated as little as the equivalent of 0.5 Mb for personal use. At the Aspen Center for Physics, in Colorado, in late June 1991, a stray comment from a physicist, concerned about emailed articles overrunning his disk allocation while traveling, suggested to me the creation of a centralized automated repository and alerting system, which would send full texts only on demand. That solution would also democratize the exchange of information, leveling the aforementioned research playing field, both internally within institutions and globally for all with network access.

Thus was born xxx.lanl.gov,18 initially an automated email server (and within a few months also an FTP server), powered by a set of csh scripts.19 It was originally intended for about 100 submissions per year from a small subfield of high-energy particle physics, but rapidly grew in users and scope, receiving 400 submissions in its first half year. The submissions were initially planned to be deleted after three months, by which time the pre-existing paper distribution system would catch up, but by popular demand nothing was ever deleted. (Renamed in late 1998 to arXiv.org, it has accumulated roughly 700,000 total submissions [mid Aug 2011], currently receives 75,000 new submissions per year, and serves roughly one million full text downloads to about 400,000 distinct users per week. The system quickly attracted the attention of existing physics publishers, and in rapid succession I received congenial visits from the editorial directors of both the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) to my little 10’x10’ office. It also had an immediate impact on physicists in less developed countries, who reported feeling finally in the loop, both for timely receipt of research ideas and for equitable reading of their own contributions. (Twenty years later, I still receive messages reporting that the system provides to them more assistance than any international organization.)

In the fall of 1992, a colleague at CERN emailed me: ‘Q: do you know the worldwide-web program?’ I did not, but quickly installed WorldWideWeb.app, serendipitously written by Tim Berners-Lee for the same NeXT computer that I was using, and with whom I began to exchange emails. Later that fall, I used it to help beta-test the first US Web server, set up by the library at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center for use by the high-energy physics community.

Not everyone appreciated just how rapidly things were progressing. In early 1994, I happened to serve on a committee advising the APS about putting Physical Review Letters online. I suggested that a Web interface along the lines of the xxx.lanl.gov prototype might be a good way for the APS to disseminate its documents. A response came back from another committee member: “Installing and learning to use a WorldWideWeb browser is a complicated and difficult task — we can’t possibly expect this of the average physicist.”

13The most significant of these was maintained by Joanne Cohn, then a postdoctoral associate at the IAS Princeton, who manually collected and redistributed preprints (originally in the subject area of matrix models of two dimensional surfaces) to what became a list of over a hundred interested researchers, largely younger postdocs and grad students. This manual methodology provided an important proof of concept for the broader automated and archival system that succeeded it, and her distribution list was among those used to seed the initial hep-th@xxx.lanl.gov userbase.

18The name xxx was derived from the heuristic I’d used in marking text in TeX files for later correction (i.e., awaiting a final search for all appearances of the string ‘xxx’, which wouldn’t otherwise appear, and for which I later learned the string ‘tk’ is employed by journalists, for similar reasons).

19The csh scripts were translated to Perl starting in 1994, when NSF funding permitted actual employees.

(the rest)

CC11x11, before, 0, &freebassel

Monday, December 16th, 2013
Gimped CC cake 10 / BY / Kristina Alexanderson
(I wrote 90% of this post a year ago; currently unaware of any actual CC 11 cakes or celebrations.)

Today is the 11th anniversary of the launch of the first version 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 were among the original 11), or as many as 608 (all versions, jurisdiction ports, retired licenses, and public domain instruments).

If 2002-12-16 is a significant marker, I’d like to take a look at what preceded it, very nearby — other public copyright licenses, public domain dedications, and ad hoc sharing statements. Eventually I hope to take a more in-depth look at all of these, and moreso I hope others do research around them.

Prior to the 1980s, such statements are very scattered. Has anyone pieced together commonalities and differences of pro-info-sharing statements through history? Examples…

In 868 the Diamond Sutra included:

Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong.

1869 Recent Discussions on the Abolition of Patents for Inventions, setting a standard that modern books on advocating reform (inclusive of abolition) fail to meet:

No rights are reserved

1910 the English translation of Gandhi’s Indian Home Rule was printed with the words No Rights Reserved on the title page.

1967 the copyright notice of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace included:

Permission is granted to reprint any of these poems in magazines, books and newspapers if they are given away free.

1976 Tiny BASIC for Intel 8080 included:

@COPYLEFT; ALL WRONGS RESERVED

1978 In the Making included:

“Alternative publications may reproduce freely provided acknowledgement is made.”

I believe many statements along such lines were published, especially in the last century, but again, as far as I know, nobody has ever thoroughly investigated. I’m very interested, in part because I have a hunch what might be characterized as “information commons” have been malgoverned for the entirety of human history. Why did pro-sharing statements, in the form of public copyright licenses, only become regularized, widespread, and thought by some as creating and protecting commons, in the 1980s, starting with software?

The easy answer is that software had just become clearly restricted by copyright, and programmers have a more immediately compelling need to collaborate across organizational boundaries in a way that implicates copyright restrictions than do others. Still, one may question just how different paths would need to have been for explicit pro-sharing practices to have developed in other domains first, even pre-computer, and how the norms of such practices might have differed. I’ve speculated, very briefly that it’s plausible order could’ve been different, and essentially software freedom norms are a “sweet spot” that would’ve been arrived at anyway. Much more could be said about that, and also about whether and how the explicit pro-sharing practices I’ve recognized as such in this post have crowded out or complemented other pro-sharing practices.

In any case, in the 5 years prior to the launch of the first 11 Creative Commons licenses, there was a proliferation of interest in public copyright licenses for various forms of non-software works (including hardware designs, which took longer to capture much interest, and I won’t cover here). An incomplete list of such licenses released 1998-2002:

Anti-Copyright License, Comic Book Public License, Design Science License, Distributed Encyclopedia General Public License, EFF Open Audio License, Electrohippie Collective’s Ethical Open Documentation License, Ethymonics Free Music License, Free Art License, Free Media License, Free Music Public License, GNU Free Documentation License, No Type License, OpenBits License, Open Content License, Open Directory License, the Open Music licenses, Open Publication License, Open Source Music License, Public Library of Science Open Access License, QING Public Licnese, and Phy-d’eau — License of Intention for Liberty in Expression and Creativity.

Many of these licenses are non-free/open, and nearly all are incompatible with all the rest. These problems preceded Creative Commons. Whether in the past 10 years Creative Commons has on net made these problems better or worse (or merely not better fast enough) is hard to say. One curiosity about these pre-CC licenses is that the only ones remaining in any kind of significant use (Free Art License and Free Documentation License) are free/open, copyleft licenses.

Near certainty of large adoption of public licenses and public domain dedications outside software also preceded CC. The effect one can be most certain of attributing to CC is of killing adoption of the few of these licenses that had any plausibility, and of the development of further non-CC licenses, for awhile. Whether a dominant central license steward was net positive, is hard to say. It’s easy to see some marketing benefits, and some innovation costs, and vice versa.

Some public licenses created for software, mostly the GNU GPL, and BSD licenses, were used for some non-software works before the explosion of non-software public licenses (of which CC was part). An open question is whether this explosion was a good thing at all, or rather a failure on the part of free software license pioneers to occupy a broader space, and create a broader-based, less fragmented movement for intellectual freedom…the part facilitated by public licenses that is.

It’s also possible that free software started with the wrong arrangement in the form of public licenses, and others, including what became CC, ought have tried something different, for example clubs/pools, or skipping voluntary methods altogether. (Many people have focused on one or more of direct action, litigation, and public policy. I tend to think there’s far too little appreciation and collaboration across these methods and voluntary construction, resulting in a further fragmented, scared, and weak movement.)

I didn’t publish a year ago because I’d intended to add sections on the “CC era” of the past 10, now 11 years, and the future. My recent extended quasi-review of CC 4.0 licenses will have to suffice. Now…

Celebrate CC’s 11th birthday:

Upgrade to CC0

Free Bassel

False similarities, true nuisances of 2005q2

Saturday, December 14th, 2013

Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement

First quarter, 8 year refutation start. This post is about six months late.

Imperial Public License. Protection of growing industries within a jurisdiction is how that jurisdiction’s economy moves up the food chain, gains competitive advantage, develops. The GPL limits one means of protecting a budding software industry within a jurisdiction, and the beneficiaries are jurisdictions with dominant software industries. Jonathan Schwartz was right: the GPL is, perhaps inadvertently, a tool of U.S. economic imperialism.

Individual Rights Central Railroad. A site promoting a symbol that looked like a railroad logo, promoting the faulty idea that freedom is founded on individual rights:

The Individual-i symbol is not owned by any organization. There is no platform, no organizational structure, no meetings. This symbol is in the public domain: uncopyrighted, untrademarked, unowned. Anyone can use it for any purpose.

No trampling on the free speech or other rights of any individual there! Very self-consistent. But also self-refuting, in time. The site went down after only 4 years, cared for by nobody, as with all freedom founded on individual rights.

Really Offshoring. Even if working on a boat offshore a wealthy area were feasible (that part of the post is nearly self-refuting, admitting that boats are expensive), it would have a miniscule impact on talent utilization and wage equalization. Good local education dwarfs any effort to bring existing capital and labor geographically closer.

Evidence-free Policy. Policy does not get made without evidence, let alone delusionally. What’s delusional is me not looking at evidence indicating that outcomes I desire are not those of the majority. Poking fun at seemingly awry policies that repeatedly result in, e.g., cost overruns or incumbent protection, is the romance of the libertarian social engineer: demanding premature optimization of democracy.

Apartheid for Musicians. Perhaps visas should be easier to obtain for musicians — to the extent they were made difficult to obtain in order to keep USians free of foreign influence, they are outmoded. But generalizing this to a call for removing all national barriers to travel, live, and work is wildly uncalled for. USian workers, including musicians, do deserve to be protected from race-to-the-bottom competition, and difficult to obtain visas are a key mechanism of protection.

Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid. The international system of states, borders, and movement restrictions is not Apartheid. Almost every person in the world is equal, in that they are born citizens of one state. Under Apartheid, non-whites denied citizenship in their birth state. The Apartheid regime tried to legitimize this by creating puppet states for non-whites to be citizens of. The international community of nations refused to recognize this scheme. There may be situations in which a population of one nation state is so oppressed by another nation state that the population of the former have effectively been stripped of their citizenship. This relation may bear some similarity to Apartheid, and one extreme solution would be to make the entire population of the oppressed state full citizens of the oppressor state. In his 2008 campaign for U.S. president, Toyama Koichi made a case for the United States having such an oppressor relation with the whole world, and thus the obligation to grant all rights as citizens. However, the proper solution is full independence, de jure and de facto, for the oppressed people’s state (watch the linked video to the end, and see that Koichi agrees). In no case however is there a call for any citizen of any state to claim citizenship rights in or travel to, live or work in, any other state, without restriction, nor is there any similarity of this general system to Apartheid.

Open the H1B Gates. The narrow industrial policy tweak of scrapping H-1B visa limits wished for by Bill Gates in no way supports generally removing restrictions on travel and work across borders. Shrink-wrap software development not leaving the U.S. for India and elsewhere shows just how little value could be obtained through the disruptive policy of scrapping H-1B visa limits, let alone removing all citizenship-based restrictions.

Public Goods Group Shopping and Kragen Sitaker on Dominant Assurance Contracts. Assurance contracts do fine for funding simple consumer products but have never addressed any political problems, and a handwaving assertion that many political problems can be thought of as public goods problems does not make it any more feasible for this to occur. The additional capital and mechanics required by dominant assurance contracts make them a merely cute idea.

Housing (Ad) Bubble. Distressed sales still needed to be advertised. (Pointers to data on how this actually turned out would be appreciated.)

Swiss Cheese Jesus. The theory that Jesus did not exist “has failed to convince the vast majority of scholars, who ‘regard it as effectively refuted’.” On quibbles with the film: it is entertainment, personal stories and exaggerated assertions are for the good.

Nothing has a URI, everything is available. Ensuring good permalinks to everything can be premature optimization, especially when paying customers always use other forms of navigation. Assassination references are never funny.

Public Goods Rent Seeking. “How can an artist make a full time living doing only art” is (one statement of) a public goods problem. The art produced is the public good, but we can’t ignore production costs. Further, more full-time artists enrich society in immeasurable ways; their existence is a massive public good.

Ugly metadata deployed. See Metadata is technical debt. Deployment as an ugly hack makes it an even more obvious no-brainer no-go. Also, the uselessness of license-filtered crawl-based search.

Betting Policy Consequences. Eventually could be longer than 8 years, but after that time betting markets are still of zero importance. That they have remained so in spite of probably being legally feasible in much of the world is particularly damning.

Typing International Apartheid. Cherry picks some sentiments that seem to align national borders with Apartheid, bypassing their fundamental dissimilarity. See Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid refutation above.

Zocalo experiment. The zocalo (market) leads to nowhere. Self-refuting dead project. On the fantasy that virtual games would soon change youth perception of market and power failures — a carnival mirror reflection of the reality — thin, manufactured, fraudulent markets purely in service of entertainment centered around violence, power, intrigue, and get-rich quick schemes.

Aubrey de Grey at Stanford. We don’t need a formal prediction market to read the market’s collective wisdom about de Grey’s proposals: he has attracted negligible funding in the past 8 years.

Sort of open source economic models. Gratis access provides almost all of the value to be had from sharing of research data, publications, and software. Introducing someone sharing as such to copyright and copyright licenses is an attack on their time and sanity. There should be nuisance laws discouraging such hectoring.

Autonomous Liberalization. Independent reforms may in the short term produce more quantifiable gains than multilateral and regional agreements, but this is a penny-wise, pound-foolish analysis. Multilateral, regional, and global agreements (and this ought be generalized to all such agreements, not only trade) set the norms and expectations for all to strive toward, beyond mere agreement compliance, set the stage for further agreements, are more robust than self-directed reform which may be repealed at a whim, and develop crucial institutions of regional and global governance.

Please help OpenHatch pick the low hanging fruit of FLOSS

Thursday, December 12th, 2013

I recently wrote concerning open source project fragmentation:

The low-hanging fruit is to help projects become easier for new contributors to get involved in, and friendly for staying involved in. Decrease the cost of contributing to existing projects, more will choose to do that rather than start, or leave to start, new projects.

That link is to OpenHatch, a nonprofit that I do a bit of volunteer administrivia and editing for. I have admired OpenHatch for longer, putting it among organizations with “potential to be important enablers of the free and open world.”

OpenHatch is picking the low-hanging fruit concerning both diversity and participation in free/open source projects. Probabilistically decreasing project fragmentation is one of many good side effects.

OpenHatch also represents a bit of sanity and depth as the “everyone needs to learn how to code” hype reaches its apogee. Not everyone needs to learn how to code, but there are plenty of ways to develop a more empowering relationship with software and how it is designed, created, maintained, distributed, marketed, controlled — how it shapes our world.

Those who do learn how to code should also learn how collaborate with others in building non-trivial, non-throwaway applications, in a way that is socially beneficial, i.e., contributing to an open source project. OpenHatch’s Open Source Comes to Campus program organizes workshops that help students (usually in partnership with a local women in computing or other student group) make their first open source contributions. We’re raising money for this program, with a match through December 24.

You can read more about Open Source Comes to Campus in an article on opensource.com by Shauna Gordon-McKeon. Then donate, and have your company sponsor Open Source Comes to Campus.

[Semi]Commons Coordinations & Copyright Choices 4.0

Monday, December 9th, 2013

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!

Below read my idiosyncratic take on issues addressed and not addressed in the 4.0 licenses. If that sounds insufferable, but you want to know about details of the 4.0 licenses, skip to the excellent version 4 and license versions pages on the CC wiki. I don’t bother linking to sections of those pages pertinent to issues below, but if you want detailed background beyond my idiosyncratic take on each issue, it can be found there.

Any criticism I have of the 4.0 licenses concerns policy choices and is not a criticism of the work done or people involved, other than myself. I fully understand that the feasible choices were and are highly constrained by previous choices and conditions, including previous versions of the CC licenses, CC’s organizational history, users of CC licenses, and the overall states of knowledge commons and info regulation and CC’s various positions within these. I always want CC and other “open” organizations to take as pro-commons of a stance as possible, and generally judge what is possible to be further than that of the conventional wisdom of people who pay any attention to this scene. Sometimes I advocated for more substantial policy changes in the 4.0 licenses, though just as often I deemed such advocacy futile. At this point I should explain that I worked for CC until just after the 4.0 licenses process started, and have consulted a bit on 4.0 licenses issues since then as a “fellow”. Not many people were in a better position to influence the 4.0 licenses, so any criticisms I have are due to my failure to convince, or perhaps incorrect decision to not try in some cases. As I’ve always noted on this blog, I don’t represent any organization here.

Desiderata

Pro-commons? As opposed to what? The title of the CC blog post announcing the formal beginning of work on the new licenses:

Copyright Experts Discuss CC License Version 4.0 at the Global Summit

My personal blog post:

Commons experts to develop version 4.0 of the CC licenses

The expertise that CC and similar organizations ought to bring to the world is commons coordination. There are many copyright experts in the world, and understanding public copyright licenses, and drafting more, are no great intellectual challenges. The copyright expertise needed to do so ought be purely instrumental, serving the purpose of commons coordination. Or so I think.

Throughout CC’s existence, it has presented itself, and been perceived as, to varying extents, an organization which provides tools for copyright holders to exercise their copyrights, and an organization which provides tools for building a commons. (What it does beyond providing tools adds another dimension, not unrelated to “copyright choice” vs. “commons coordination”; there’s some discussion of these issues in a video included in my personal post above.)

I won’t explain in this post, but I think the trend through most of CC’s history has been very slow movement in the “commons coordination” direction, and the explicit objectives of the 4.0 versioning process fit that crawl.

“Commons coordination” does not directly imply the usual free/open vs. proprietary/closed dichotomy. I think it does mostly fall out that way, in small part due to “license interoperability” practicalities, but probably mostly because I think the ideal universal copyregulation policy corresponds to the non-discriminatory commons that “free/open” terms and communities carve out on a small scale, including the pro-sharing policy that copyleft prototypes, and excluding any role for knowledge enclosure, monopoly, property, etc. But it is certainly possible, indeed usual, to advocate for a mixed regime (I enjoy the relatively new term “semicommons”, but if you wish to see it everywhere, try every non-demagogic call for “balance”), in which case [semi]commons tools reserving substantial exclusivity (e.g., “commercial use”) make perfect sense for [semi]commons coordination.

Continuing to ignore the usual [non-]open dichotomy, I think there still are a number of broad criteria for would-be stewards of any new commons coordinating license (and make no mistake, a new version of a license is a new license; CC introduced 6 new licenses with 4.0) to consider carefully, and which inform my commentary below:

  • Differentiation: does the new license implement some policy not currently available in existing licenses, or at least offer a great improvement in implementation (not to provide excuses for new licenses, but the legal text is just one part of implementation; also consider branding/positioning, understandability, and stewardship) of policy already available?
  • Permissions: does the new license grant all permissions needed to realize its policy objective?
  • Regulation: how does the license’s policy objective model regulation that ought be adopted at a wider scale, e.g., how does it align with usual “user rights” and “copyright reform” proposals?
  • Interoperability: is the new license maximally compatible with existing licenses, given the constraints of its policy objectives, and indeed, to the expense of its immediate policy objectives, given that incompatibility, non-interoperability, and proliferation must fragment and diminish the value of commons?
  • Cross-domain impact: how does the license impact license interoperability and knowledge sharing across fields/domains/communities (e.g., software, data, hardware, “content”, research, government, education, culture…)? Does it further silo existing domains, a tragedy given the paucity of knowledge about governing commons in the world, or facilitate sharing and collaboration across domains?

Several of these are merely a matter of good product design and targeting, and would also apply to an organization that really had a primary goal of offering copyright holders additional choices the organization deems are under-provided. I suspect there is plenty of room for innovation in “copyright choice” tools, but I won’t say more in this post, as such have little to do with commons, and whatever CC’s history of copyright choice rhetoric and offering a gaggle of choices, creating such tools is distant from its immediate expertise (other than just knowing lots about copyright) and light years from much of its extended community.

Why bother?

Apart from amusing myself and a few others, why this writeup? The CC 4.0 licenses won’t change, and hopefully there won’t be CC 4.1 or 4.5 or 5.0 licenses for many years. Longevity was an explicit goal for 4.0 (cf. 1.0: 17 months, 2.0: 12 months; 2.5: 20 months; 3.0: 81 months). Still, some of the issues covered here may be interesting to people choosing to use one of the CC 4.0 licenses, and people creating other licenses. Although nobody wants more licenses, often called license proliferation, as an end in itself, many more licenses is the long term trend, of which the entire history of CC is just a part. Further, more licenses can be a good, to the extent they are significantly different from and better than, and as compatible as possible with, existing licenses.

To be totally clear: many new licenses will be created and used over the next 10 years, intended for various domains. I would hope, some for all domains. Proliferators, take heed!

Development tools

A 4.0 wiki page and a bunch of pages under that were used to lay out objectives, issues and options for resolution, and link to drafts. Public discussion was on the cc-licenses list, with tangential debate pushed to cc-community. Drafts and changes from previous drafts were published as redlined word processor files. This all seems to have worked fairly well. I’d prefer drafts as plain text files in a git repository, and an issue tracker, in addition to a mailing list. But that’s a substantially different workflow, and word processor documents with track changes and inline comments do have advantages, not limited to lawyers being familiar with those tools.

100% wiki would also work, with different tradeoffs. In the future additional tools around source repositories, or wikis, or wikis in source repositories, will finally displace word processor documents, but the tools aren’t there yet. Or in the bad future, all licenses will be drafted in word processors in the cloud.

(If it seems that I’m leaving a a lot out, e.g., methodology for gathering requirements and feedback, in-person and teleconferences, etc., I merely have nothing remotely interesting to say, and used “tools” rather than “process” to narrow scope intentionally.)

Internationalization

The 4.0 licenses were drafted to be jurisdiction neutral, and there will be official, equivalent, verbatim language translations of the licenses (the same as CC0, though I don’t think any translations have been made final yet). Legal “porting” to individual jurisdictions is not completely ruled out, but I hope there will be none. This is a wholly positive outcome, and probably the most impactful change for CC itself (already playing out over the past few years, e.g., in terms of scope and composition of CC affiliates), though it is of small direct consequence to most users.

Now, will other license drafters and would-be drafters follow CC’s lead and stop with the vanity jurisdiction license proliferation already?

Databases

At least the EU, Mexico, Russia, and South Korea have created “database rights” (there have been attempts in other jurisdictions), copyright-like mechanisms for entities that assemble databases to persecute others who would extract or copy substantial portions of said databases. Stupid policies that should be abolished, copyright-like indeed.

Except for CC0 and some minor and inconsistent exceptions (certain within-EU jurisdiction “port” versions), CC licenses prior to 4.0 have not “covered” database rights. This means, modulo any implied license which may or may not be interpreted as existing, that a prior-to-4.0 (e.g., CC-BY-3.0) licensee using a database subject to database restrictions (when this occurs is a complicated question) would have permission granted by the licensor around copyright restrictions, but not around database restrictions. This is a pretty big fail, considering that the first job of a public license is to grant adequate permissions. Actual responses to this problem:

  • Tell all database publishers to use CC0. I like this, because everyone should just use CC0. But, it is an inadequate response, as many will continue to use less permissive terms, often in the form of inadequate or incompatible licenses.
  • Only waive or license database restrictions in “ports” of licenses to jurisdictions in which database restrictions exist. This is wholly inadequate, as in the CC scheme, porting involves tailoring the legal language of a license to a jurisdiction, but there’s no guarantee a licensor or licensee in such jurisdictions will be releasing or using databases under one of these ports, and in fact that’s often not the case.
  • Have all licenses waive database restrictions. This sounds attractive, but is mostly confusing — it’s very hard to discern when only database and not copyright restrictions apply, such that a licensee could ignore a license’s conditions — and like “tell database publishers to use CC0” would just lead many to use different licenses that do purport to conditionally license database rights.
  • Have all licenses grant permissions around database restrictions, under whatever conditions are present in the license, just like copyright.

I think the last is the right approach, and it’s the one taken with the CC 4.0 licenses, as well as by other licenses which would not exist but for CC 3.0 licenses not taking this approach. I’m even more pleased with their generality, because other copyright-like restrictions are to be expected (emphasis added):

Copyright and Similar Rights means copyright and/or similar rights closely related to copyright including, without limitation, performance, broadcast, sound recording, and Sui Generis Database Rights, without regard to how the rights are labeled or categorized. For purposes of this Public License, the rights specified in Section 2(b)(1)-(2) are not Copyright and Similar Rights.

The exclusions of 2(b)(1)-(2) are a mixed bag; see moral and personality rights, and patents below.

CC0 also includes a definition with some generality:

Copyright and Related Rights include, but are not limited to, the following:

  1. the right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform,
    display, communicate, and translate a Work;
  2. moral rights retained by the original author(s) and/or
    performer(s);
  3. publicity and privacy rights pertaining to a person’s
    image or likeness depicted in a Work;
  4. rights protecting against unfair competition in regards
    to a Work, subject to the limitations in paragraph 4(a),
    below;
  5. rights protecting the extraction, dissemination, use and
    reuse of data in a Work;
  6. database rights (such as those arising under Directive
    96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11
    March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, and under
    any national implementation thereof, including any amended
    or successor version of such directive); and
  7. other similar, equivalent or corresponding rights
    throughout the world based on applicable law or treaty, and
    any national implementations thereof.

As does GPLv3:

“Copyright” also means copyright-like laws that apply to other kinds of works, such as semiconductor masks.

Do CC0 and CC 4.0 licenses cover semiconductor mask restrictions (best not to use for this purpose anyway, see patents)? Does GPLv3 cover database restrictions? I’d hope the answer is yes in each case, and if the answer is no or ambiguous, future licenses further improve on the generality of restrictions around which permissions are granted.

There is one risk in licensing everything possible, and culturally it seems, specifically in licensing database rights — the impression that licensee which do so ‘create obligations’ related to those rights. I find this an odd way to think of a conditional permission as the creation of an obligation, when the user’s situation without said permission is unambiguously worse, i.e., no permission. Further, this impression is a problem for non-maximally-permissive licenses around copyright, not only database or other copyright-like rights.

In my opinion the best a public license can do is to grant permissions (conditionally, if not a maximally permissive license) around restrictions with as much generality as possible, and expressly state that a license is not needed (and therefore conditions to not apply) if a user can ignore underlying restrictions for some other reason. Can the approach of CC version 4.0 licenses to the latter be improved?

For the avoidance of doubt, where Exceptions and Limitations apply to Your use, this Public License does not apply, and You do not need to comply with its terms and conditions.

These are all trivialities for license nerds. For publishers and users of databases: Data is free. Free the data!

Moral and personality rights

CC 4.0 licenses address them well:

Moral rights, such as the right of integrity, are not licensed under this Public License, nor are publicity, privacy, and/or other similar personality rights; however, to the extent possible, the Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any such rights held by the Licensor to the limited extent necessary to allow You to exercise the Licensed Rights, but not otherwise.

To understand just how well, CC 3.0 licenses say:

Except as otherwise agreed in writing by the Licensor or as may be otherwise permitted by applicable law, if You Reproduce, Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work either by itself or as part of any Adaptations or Collections, You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author’s honor or reputation. Licensor agrees that in those jurisdictions (e.g. Japan), in which any exercise of the right granted in Section 3(b) of this License (the right to make Adaptations) would be deemed to be a distortion, mutilation, modification or other derogatory action prejudicial to the Original Author’s honor and reputation, the Licensor will waive or not assert, as appropriate, this Section, to the fullest extent permitted by the applicable national law, to enable You to reasonably exercise Your right under Section 3(b) of this License (right to make Adaptations) but not otherwise.

Patents and trademark

Prior versions were silent, CC 4.0 licenses state:

Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License.

Perhaps some potential licensor will be reassured, but I consider this unnecessary and slightly harmful, replicating the main deficiency of CC0. The explicit exclusion makes it harder to see an implied license. This is especially troublesome when CC licenses are used in fields in which patents can serve as a barrier. Software is one, for which CC has long disrecommended use of CC licenses largely because software is already well-covered by licenses with which CC licenses are mostly incompatible with; the explicit patent exclusion in the CC 4.0 licenses makes them even less suitable. Hardware design is another such field, but one with fragmented licensing, including use of CC licenses. CC should now explicitly disrecommend using CC licenses for hardware designs and declare CC-BY-SA-4.0 one-way compatible with GPLv3+ so that projects using one of the CC-BY-SA licenses for hardware designs have a clear path to a more appropriate license.

Patents of course can be licensed separately, and as I pointed out before regarding CC0, there could be curious arrangements for projects using such licenses with patent exclusions, such as only accepting contributions from Defensive Patent License users. But the better route for “open hardware” projects and the like to take advantage of this complementarity is to do both, that is use a copyright and related rights license that includes a patent peace clause, and join the DPL club.

DRM

CC 4.0 licenses:

The Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any right or authority to forbid You from making technical modifications necessary to exercise the Licensed Rights, including technical modifications necessary to circumvent Effective Technological Measures.

This is a nice addition, which had been previously suggested for CC 3.0 licenses and rejected — the concept copied from GPLv3 drafts at the time. I would have preferred to also remove the limited DRM prohibition in the CC licenses.

Attribution

The CC 4.0 licenses slightly streamline and clarify the substance of the attribution requirement, all to the good. The most important bit, itself only a slight streamlining and clarification of similar in previous versions:

You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.

This pulls in the wild use from near zero to-the-letter compliance to fairly high.

I’m not fond of the requirement to remove attribution information if requested by the licensor, especially accurate information. I don’t know whether a licensor has ever made such a request, but that makes the clause only pointless rather than harmful. Not quite though, as it does make for a talking point.

NonCommercial

not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. For purposes of this Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.

Not intended to be a substantive change, but I’ll take it. I’d have preferred a probably more significantly narrowed definition and a re-branding so as to increase the range of and differentiation among the licenses that CC stewards. But at the beginning of the 4.0 licenses process, I expected no progress, so am not disappointed. Branding and other positioning changes could come post-launch, if anyone is so inclined.

I think the biggest failure of the range of licenses with an NC term (and there are many preceding CC) is not confusion and pollution of commons, very roughly the complaints of people who would like NC to have a more predictable meaning and those who think NC offers inadequate permissions, respectively, but lack of valuable use. Licenses with the NC term are certainly used for hundreds of millions of photos and web pages, and some (hundreds of?) thousands of songs, videos, and books, but few where either the licensor or the public gains significant value above what would have been achieved if the licensor had simply offered gratis access (i.e., put stuff on the web, which is incredibly valuable even with no permissions granted). As far as I know, NC licenses haven’t played a significant role in enabling (again, relative to gratis access) any disruptive product or policy, and their use by widely recognized artists and brands is negligible (cf. CC-BY-SA, which Wikipedia and other mass collaboration projects rely on to exist, and CC-BY and CC0, which are part of disruptive policy mandates).

CC is understandably somewhat stuck between free/open norms, which make licenses with the NC an embarrassment, and their numerically large but low value uses. A license steward or would-be steward that really believed a semicommons license regime could do much more would try to break out of this rut by doing a complete rethink of the product (or that part of the product line), probably resulting in something much more different from the current NC implementation than the mere definitional narrowing and rebranding that I started out preferring. This could be related to my commentary on innovation in “copyright choice” tools above; whether the two are really the same thing would be a subject for inquiry.

NoDerivatives

If there were licenses that should not have been brought to version 4.0, at least not under the CC brand, it would have been CC-BY-NC-ND and CC-BY-ND.

Instead, an express permission to make derivatives so long as they are not shared was added. This change makes so-called text/content/data mining of any work under any of the CC version 4.0 licenses unambiguously permitted, and makes ND stick out a tiny bit less as an aberration from the CC license suite modeling some moderate copyright reform baseline.

There are some costs to this approach: surprise that a “no derivatives” license permits derivatives, slight reduction in scope and differentiation among licenses that CC stewards, giving credence to ND licenses as acceptable for scholarship, and abetting the impression that text/content/data mining requires permission at all. The last is most worrisome, but (as with similar worries around licensing databases) can be turned into a positive to the extent CC and everyone knowledgeable emphasizes that you ought not and probably don’t need a license; we’re just making sure you have the freedoms around CC licensed works that you ought to have anyway, in case the info regulation regime gets even worse — but please, mine away.

ShareAlike

This is the most improved named (BY/NC/ND/SA) elements in CC 4.0 licenses, and the work is not done yet. But first, I wish it had been improved even more, by making more uses unambiguously “trigger” the SA provision. This has been done once, starting in 2.0:

For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (“synching”) will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License.

The obvious next expansion would have been use of images (still or moving) in contextual relation to other material, eg illustrations used in a text. Without this expansion, CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC-SA are essentially identical to CC-BY and CC-BY-NC respectively for the vast majority of actual “reuse” instances. Such an expansion would have substantially increased the range of and differentiation among licenses that CC stewards. The main problem with such an expansion (apart from specifying it exactly) would be increasing the cost of incompatibility, where texts and images use different licenses. This problem would be mitigated by increasing compatibility among copyleft licenses (below), or could be eliminated by broadening the SA licensing requirement for uses triggered by expansion, eg any terms granting at least equivalent permissions, such that a CC-BY-SA illustration could still be used in a text licensed under CC-BY or CC0. Such an expansion did not make the cut, but I think together with aforementioned broadening of licensing requirements, such a modulation (neither strictly “stronger” nor “weaker”) would make for an interesting and heretofore unimplemented approach to copyleft, in some future license.

Apart from a subtle improvement that brings SA closer to a full “or later versions” license, and reflects usual practice and understanding (incidentally, “no sublicensing” in non-SA licenses remains pointless, is not to be found in most non-CC permissive licenses, and should not be replicated), the big improvements in CC 4.0 licenses with the SA element are the addition of the potential for one-way compatibility to CC-BY-SA, adding the same compatibility mechanism to CC-BY-NC-SA, and discussions with stewards of potentially compatible licenses which make the realization of compatibility more likely. (I would have included a variation on the more complex but in my view elegant and politically advisable mechanism introduced in MPL 2.0, which allows for continued use under the donor compatible license as long as possible. Nobody demanded such, so not adding the complexity was perhaps a good thing.)

I hope that in 2014 CC-BY-SA-4.0 will be declared bilaterally compatible with the Free Art License 1.3, or if a new FAL version is required, it is being worked on, with achieving bilateral compatibility as a hard requirement, and more importantly, that CC-BY-SA-4.0 is declared one-way compatible (as a donor) with GPLv3+. An immediate step toward those ends will be finalizing an additional statement of intent regarding the stewardship of licenses with the ShareAlike element.

Though I’ll be surprised if any license appears as a candidate for compatibility with CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0, adding the mechanism to that license is a good thing: as a matter of general license stewardship, reducing the barriers to someone else creating a better NC license (see above), and keeping “porting” completely outside the 4.0 license texts (hopefully there will be no porting, but if there is any, compatibility with the international versions in licenses with the SA element would be exclusively via the compatibility mechanism used for any potentially compatible license).

Tech

All license clauses have id attributes, allowing direct linking to a particular clause. These direct links are used for references within the licenses. These are big usability improvements.

I would have liked to see an expansive “tech” (including to some extent design) effort synchronized with the 4.0 licenses, from the practical (e.g., a canonical format for license texts, from which HTML, plain text, and others are generated; that may be HTML, but the current license HTML is inadequate for the task) to the impractical (except for increasing CC’s reputation, e.g., investigating whether any semantic annotation and structure, preferably building on existing research, would be useful, in theory, for the license texts, and possibly even a practical aid to translation), to testing further upgrades to the ‘legal user interface’ constituted by the license texts and “deed” summaries (e.g., combining these), to just bringing various CC tooling and documentation up to date with RDFa 1.1 Lite. But, some of these things could be done post-launch if anyone is so inclined, and my understanding is that CC has only a single technology person on staff, dedicated to creating other products, and most importantly, the ability to directly link to any license clause probably has more practical benefits than anything on my wishlist.

Readability

One of the best things about the CC 4.0 licenses is their increased understandability. This is corroborated by crude automated readability metrics below, but I suspect these do not adequately characterize the improvement, for they include three paragraphs of explanatory text not present in previous versions, probably don’t fully reflect the improvement of splitting hairball paragraphs into lists, and have no mechanism for accounting for how the improved usability of linking to individual clauses contributes to understandability.

CC-BY-NC-SA (the license with the most stuff in it, usually used as a drafting template for others) from version 1.0 through 4.0, including 4.0 drafts (lower numbers indicate better readability, except in the case of Flesch; Chars/(Flesch>=1) is my gross metric for how painful it is to read a document; see license automated readability metrics for an explanation):

SHA1 License Characters Kincaid ARI Coleman-Liau Fog Lix SMOG Flesch Chars/(Flesch>=1)
39b2ef67be9e5b4e743e5269a31ad1691515eede CC-BY-NC-SA-1.0 10228 13.3 16.3 14.2 17.0 59.7 14.2 48.4 211
5800ac2d32e35ace035cdcae693423cd9ff5bb6f CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 11927 13.3 16.2 14.7 17.1 60.0 14.4 47.0 253
e5f44c2df6b1391d1ddb6efb2db6f90670e4ae67 CC-BY-NC-SA-2.5 12013 13.1 16.0 14.6 16.9 59.6 14.2 47.7 251
a63b7e81e7b9e30df5d253aed1d2991af47992df CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 17134 16.4 19.7 14.2 20.6 67.0 16.3 38.8 441
8b36c30ed0510d9ca9c69a2ef826b9fd52992474 by-nc-sa-4.0d1 12465 13.0 15.0 14.9 16.3 57.4 14.0 43.9 283
4a87c7af5cde7729e2e456ee0e8958f8632e3005 by-nc-sa-4.0d2 11583 13.1 14.8 14.2 16.8 56.2 14.4 44.7 259
bb6f239f7b39343d62440bff00de24da2b3d256f by-nc-sa-4.0d3 14422 14.1 15.8 15.1 18.2 61.0 15.4 38.6 373
cf5629ae38a745f4f9eca429f7b26af2e71eb109 by-nc-sa-4.0d4 14635 13.8 15.6 15.5 17.8 60.2 15.2 38.6 379
a5e1b9829fd287cbe255df71eb9a5aad7fb19dbc by-nc-sa-4.0d4v2 14808 14.0 15.8 15.5 18.0 60.6 15.2 38.1 388
887f9a5da675cf681421eab3ac6d61f82cf34971 CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 14577 13.1 14.7 15.7 17.1 58.6 14.7 40.1 363

Versions 1.0 through 4.0 of each of the six CC licenses brought to version 4.0, and CC0:

SHA1 License Characters Kincaid ARI Coleman-Liau Fog Lix SMOG Flesch Chars/(Flesch>=1)
74286ae0dfea38c489437bf659b209737945145c CC0-1.0 5116 16.2 19.5 15.0 19.5 66.3 15.6 36.8 139
c766cc6d5e63277e46a3d83c6254e3528082587b CC-BY-1.0 8867 12.6 15.5 14.1 16.4 57.8 13.8 51.3 172
bf23729bec8ffd0de4d319fb33395c595c5c762b CC-BY-2.0 9781 12.1 14.9 14.3 16.1 56.7 13.7 51.9 188
024bb6d37d0a17624cf532bd14fbd42e15c5a963 CC-BY-2.5 9867 11.9 14.7 14.2 15.8 56.3 13.6 52.6 187
20dc61b94cfe1f4ba5814b340095b4c3fa23e801 CC-BY-3.0 14956 16.1 19.4 14.1 20.4 66.1 16.2 40.0 373
00b29551deee9ced874ffb9d29379b92f1487045 CC-BY-4.0 13003 13.0 14.5 15.4 16.9 57.9 14.6 41.1 316
e0c4b13ec5f9b5702d2e8b88d98b803e07d65cf8 CC-BY-NC-1.0 9313 13.2 16.2 14.3 17.0 59.3 14.1 49.3 188
970421995789d2e8189bb12071ab838a3fcf2a1a CC-BY-NC-2.0 10635 13.1 16.1 14.6 17.2 59.5 14.4 48.1 221
08773bb9bc13959c6f00fd49fcc081d69bda2744 CC-BY-NC-2.5 10721 12.9 15.8 14.5 16.9 59.0 14.2 48.9 219
9639556280637272ace081949f2a95f9153c0461 CC-BY-NC-3.0 15732 16.5 19.9 14.1 20.8 67.2 16.4 38.7 406
afcbb9791897e1e2f949d9d56ba64164746e0828 CC-BY-NC-4.0 13520 13.2 14.8 15.6 17.2 58.6 14.8 39.8 339
9ab2a3818e6ccefbc6ffdd48df7ecaec25e32e41 CC-BY-NC-ND-1.0 8729 12.7 15.8 14.4 16.4 58.6 13.8 51.0 171
966c97357e3b529e9c8bb8166fbb871c5bc31211 CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 10074 13.0 16.1 14.7 17.0 59.7 14.3 48.8 206
c659a0e3a5ee8eba94aec903abdef85af353f11f CC-BY-NC-ND-2.5 10176 12.8 15.9 14.6 16.8 59.2 14.2 49.3 206
ad4d3e6d1fb6f89bbd28a44e263a89430b575dfa CC-BY-NC-ND-3.0 14356 16.3 19.7 14.1 20.5 66.8 16.2 39.7 361
68960bdf512ff5219909f932b8a81fdb255b4642 CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0 13350 13.3 14.8 15.7 17.2 58.4 14.8 39.4 338
39b2ef67be9e5b4e743e5269a31ad1691515eede CC-BY-NC-SA-1.0 10228 13.3 16.3 14.2 17.0 59.7 14.2 48.4 211
5800ac2d32e35ace035cdcae693423cd9ff5bb6f CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 11927 13.3 16.2 14.7 17.1 60.0 14.4 47.0 253
e5f44c2df6b1391d1ddb6efb2db6f90670e4ae67 CC-BY-NC-SA-2.5 12013 13.1 16.0 14.6 16.9 59.6 14.2 47.7 251
a63b7e81e7b9e30df5d253aed1d2991af47992df CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 17134 16.4 19.7 14.2 20.6 67.0 16.3 38.8 441
887f9a5da675cf681421eab3ac6d61f82cf34971 CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 14577 13.1 14.7 15.7 17.1 58.6 14.7 40.1 363
e4851120f7e75e55b82a2c007ed98ffc962f5fa9 CC-BY-ND-1.0 8280 12.3 15.5 14.3 16.1 57.9 13.6 52.4 158
f1aa9011714f0f91005b4c9eb839bdb2b4760bad CC-BY-ND-2.0 9228 11.9 14.9 14.5 15.8 56.9 13.5 52.7 175
5f665a8d7ac1b8fbf6b9af6fa5d53cecb05a1bd3 CC-BY-ND-2.5 9330 11.8 14.7 14.4 15.6 56.5 13.4 53.2 175
3fb39a1e46419e83c99e4c9b6731268cbd1591cd CC-BY-ND-3.0 13591 15.8 19.2 14.1 20.0 65.6 15.9 41.2 329
ac747a640273815cf3a431be0afe4ec5620493e3 CC-BY-ND-4.0 12830 13.0 14.4 15.4 16.9 57.6 14.6 40.7 315
dda55573a1a3a80d294b1bb9e1eeb3a6c722968c CC-BY-SA-1.0 9779 13.1 16.1 14.2 16.8 59.1 14.0 49.5 197
9cceb80d865e52462983a441904ef037cf3a4576 CC-BY-SA-2.0 11044 12.5 15.3 14.4 16.2 57.9 13.8 50.2 220
662ca9fce7fed61439fcbc27ca0d6db0885718d9 CC-BY-SA-2.5 11130 12.3 15.0 14.4 16.0 57.5 13.6 50.9 218
4a5bb64814336fb26a9e5d36f22896ce4d66f5e0 CC-BY-SA-3.0 17013 16.4 19.8 14.1 20.5 67.2 16.2 38.9 437
8632363dcc2c9fc44f582b14274259b3a35744b2 CC-BY-SA-4.0 14041 12.9 14.4 15.4 16.8 57.8 14.5 41.4 339

It’s good for automated readability metrics that from 3.0 to 4.0 CC-BY-SA is most improved (the relevant clause was a hairball paragraph; CC-BY-NC-SA should have improved less, as it gained the compatibility mechanism) and CC-BY-ND is least improved (it gained express permission for private adaptations).

Next

I leave a list of recommendations (many already mingled in or implied by above) to a future post. But really, just use CC0.