strange symphonies

What I don’t like about the Creative Commons

June 6th, 2007 by aizatto

There are a few things I don’t like about the Creative Commons. Yes no matter how great I think it is, I find there are several problems with it. All resoling around the licensing.

Its great how they made a human readable version of its licenses, but the plethora of choices makes it difficult for people to understand what they can do with it. Seriously.

First of all, its this image:

My problem with it is that, it doesn’t tell you what the work is licensed under. You simply cannot identify it.

Similarly I hear people saying that they have licensed their work “under a Creative Commons license”. Which license buddy?

Second of all, is the confusing licenses. Here is an extract from the Creative Commons blog about the Retirement of standalone DevNations and one Sampling license

Later this month, we will begin a discussion about adding the terms of the Developing Nations license to 5 of the other CC licenses, and giving users the option to include those terms in their license. (So, for example, you could select a BY-NC license for the developed world, but offer a BY license for creators within Developing Nations.) Because such an option would be attached to a standard CC license, it would not conflict with the principle we are announcing here.

At present there are 5 licenses (not including past versions, which would increase the total dramatically).

So now you have to differentiate the difference between developing country and a non developing country. Yes, there is a certain appeal to it, but I personally think its making the licenses more and more confusing.

We estimate just 0.01% of our existing licenses are Developing Nations licenses,

So the Developing Nations are already unpopular, would it help if they were joined with normal licenses?

I see a purpose for the developing nations license, but merging the two seems inappropriate to me. There is a light discussion going on in the Creative Commons mailing list discussing the future actions that will be taken.

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Blog Post Ideas

May 31st, 2007 by aizatto

I’ve had some ideas to blog about, but I am having trouble finding the effort to put my thoughts down into coherent post.

So I thought I’ll list them down and see if anyone wants to pick them up.

• Malaysia’s large disregard for intellectual property
• Treatment of Copyrighted work as if it were in the public domain
• The perception that Malaysians are content consumers and not creators
• The catch 22 in that Malaysians will trust foreign brands more than local ones (Not common to Malaysia)
• Perception that most Malaysian creators are of low quality (yes there is the success of Lat, but how many more are there?)
• Trust, and confidence in local brands
• The Internet leveling the playing field (I’ve been told to read “The World Is Flat“)
• The Internet and the commons
• The public domain and the commons
• Preservation of culture through the commons and the Internet
• ICT for accelerating/aiding Development
• Transfer of technology and knowledge (think Free Culture), and bridging the digital/knowledge divide
• Persistence over the norms, over technical merit
• The wealthy nation problem
• Does Free Culture depend on a merit based culture/society?
• Building content creators
• Building a knowledge economy

I somehow think they can all be weaved together.

Starting with the current state of Malaysia’s disregard for Intellectual Property Rights, and going into how to improve that by building the trust, confidence, perception in Malaysian products by leveraging the free flow of information out there. But the biggest problem I forsee is that there will be persistence to stick with the norms as its easier to pay for it, especially in a wealthy nation. This raises the question of what does Free Culture depend upon a merit based culture?

Sounds like it would be a good series of articles to do though.

   Post in Free Culture, Free and Open Source Software, Intellectual Property Rights, Malaysia    1 Comment

Creative Commons Hardware

May 15th, 2007 by aizatto

I don’t normally link jack, but this was to cool to miss out.

We’ve all (or maybe only a minute portion of us) heard of Open Source Hardware, but how about Creative Commons Licensed Hardware?

Source: Geek Technique

I don’t know if it was photoshopped or anything, but if it wasn’t that would be cool.

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