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.
