Editing Creative Commons

The '''Creative Commons''' [[parametric license]] regime is a more flexible alternative to [[GFDL]].  Its [[nonprofit]] [http://creativecommons.org .org] was founded by [[Lawrence Lessig]] which attempts to:

*advocate for rights of creators to share their work with each other - without the strict requirements or flaws of [[Open Source]] which many creators reject
*provide a [[parametric license]] with predictable terms to simplify use of works by others, similar to what prevails in the music industry where there is no need to seek specific permission for certain types of pre-cleared uses (though Creative Commons does not at present have a royalty handling system and deals only with free use)
*define exact legal [[Share Alike]] terms to encourage [[share-alike]] that goes beyond [[free software]] and extends into music, writing, reporting and arts
*define exact legal [[NoDerivs]] terms to permit artists who do not want work to be changed by others, e.g. as in the film industry where directors resist such modifications, to find common cause and work to defend common contracts
*encourage [[open content]] by developing the idea of [[Common Content]] which is more exactly legally defined as anything under any of the above licenses

The '''Creative Commons attribution-sharealike''' or '''CC-by-sa''' license is normally considered to be the closest equivalent to the [[GFDL]] used here at [[Consumerium:Itself]].  Some advocate dual-licensing open content under both so it would be easier to swap text between these two [[share-alike]] content licenses.

=== beyond GFDL ===

There are serious problems with the [[GFDL]] and especially its [[Wikimedia violates GFDL|extreme bad-faith interpretation by Wikimedia]] which has so twisted the license's intent as to put all of [[Wikipedia]] in public domain.

The [[Green Documentation License]] expected to be a [[Consumerium License]] may actually fit within the parametric options that the CC license provides.  Thus, the GDL would *be* a CC license, but it would not be the [[GFDL]] license.  Talks are ongoing to dual license most of the [[GFDL text corpus]] under something that might end up as a variant of the [[CC by-sa]] license, which is the most useful [[consortium license]] - requiring [[attribution]] and [[share-alike]], with possibly additional terms to deal with [[moral rights]], which the [[Front-Cover Text]]s, [[Back-Cover Text]]s, [[Secondary Section]] and [[Invariant Section]]s are supposed to help express (though some claim that they do so imperfectly).

It is also possible that the GDL could simply require certain Invariant Sections and other Secondary Sections and citation in full, which might actually be possible under the [[GFDL]] or some future variation of it.  By permitting these, the GFDL is in effectively also a [[parametric license]] if these capabilities are used in certain ways, especially to reinforce moral rights - such as to add a non-deletable statement that the work is not to be used in some way.  Note that most of the [[GFDL text corpus]] does not have such moral rights expressions within it, and [[mediawiki]] does not support managing them, though nothing prevents other users from picking up texts and adding such terms.  Their expressed desires would only apply to their own texts of course.

There are ideologists who oppose even the simple moral rights terms of the GFDL, and will probably destroy the integrity of the GFDL regime in the long term by demanding that everything "be free", meaning, you can change "X is a Nazi" to "X is not a Nazi" and no one who was involved in exposing X as a Nazi can even object.  This is, in a word, stupid.  But so are many [[free software]] aficionados, most of whom don't actually write any useful code.

It's possible that all three licenses (GPL, GFDL, and GDL) will specify terms under which material licensed to one can be released under the others.  The Green regime would be the most restrictive, and probably sufficient for Consumerium.  If not then the even more restrictive [[Consumerium Software License]] could be applied by [[CGO]] to our work, or, we could propose a new '''Creative Commons''' license to deal with the messy situation above.  

See [[faction license]] for a proposal to optimize the flexibility of this.

== External links ==

*http://creativecommons.org
*http://zesty.ca/cc.html - pros and cons
*http://commoncontent.org - everything licensed under CC