<nettime> suggesting creative commons to extend the "commercial use" question

["ozgur k." <ozgur.k@httpdot.net>]

suggesting creative commons to extend the "commercial use" question

is anyone interested in forming a workgroup to develop a proposal for
creative commons to change/extend "Allow commercial uses of your work?"
question during license choice?

i have been having a hard time trying to explain the consequences of
choosing a "non-commercial" cc license to the authors who just do not
want commercial *exploitations* of their work but would be ok, even
happy, when someone would have the freedom to make some money as a
result of their contributions to the work and even donate back a part of
this money to the original author. my point is that copyleft attitude is
enough to prevent commercial *exploitation* of a work, while enabling
people to make some money, which cannot be more than the value they add
to the original work and which would give way to another economics for
cultural works, which is not based on accumulation of capital: the
requirement for accumulation of capital to obtain the “rights” for
reproduction and sale in advance (the investment) has been one of
reasons for justifying the "culture industry”.

the problem with cc is that, when you ask someone do you want to "Allow
commercial uses of your work?", anyone who is not happy with the current
economics of culture industry would say "no" as a quick reflex, unless
they know about the politics and consequences of the copyleft attitude.
of course there are many people who has no problem with the culture
industry and choose nc just to promote their work, through which they
think they cannot make any money but still has a hope that one day
someone may ask to "license" their work to use for commercial purposes
with exclusive rights to do so. i believe most of the people who choose
nc with such motivations but the rest of the authors should at least be
informed about the consequences of both options. cc did a good job
adding "This is not a Free Cultural License" notice when one chooses a
cc license with nd and/or nc clause. so they may consider such a
proposal if the wording would sound "neutral". rob myers once wrote to
nettime that the proposal for re-labeling cc licenses as “free cultural”
and “non-free cultural” was not appreciated so this would conflict with
the neo-liberal and author-centric perspective of cc but at least we
would have proposed... we would also have a new document that explains
the consequences of choosing nc or just copleyft...

does anyone know or at least can think of a situation where copyleft is
not enough to prevent commercial *exploitation*? I know that this
"exploitation” vocabulary is not so "neutral" but below is an example of
what i have in my mind and should definitely change and be simplified
while proposing to cc and backed up with a report of discussing the
possible scenarios and giving examples.



the question should change and give more options according to the answer:

are you ok with the possibility of commercial exploitation of your work
by others?

The answer "yes" would direct to CC by, CC by-sa and CC0 options.

The answer "no" would bring up two more options as follows and link to
an info document we would prepare and host under freedomdefined.org and
other possible places, even on cc website.

Would you like to reserve your rights to give others the exclusive
rights to commercially exploit your work in the future by re-licensing
the work to them with a copyright license but now license your work with
a "non-commercial" clause that reserves the right to make any money
through the work to yourself only but not to anyone else who builds on
your work?

Would you like to give people the freedom of the possibily making some
money through donations etc by building on your work without
commercially exploiting neither your nor their labour and making some
money up to the degree of the value they add to your work. If they are
nice people, they may also share part of the money with you. Choosing
this answer, you will license your work with cc by-sa, which is a
copyleft free cultural license and people who build on your work will
have to make their contributions free/libre for others to build on,
including you.



so my point is calling for forming a working group together with
like-minded people and even opponents, to propose cc to consider the
wording and options they feature while choosing a license. even if it
will not be effective on cc, at least we would have a document for some
curious people



the “rights” related to this text overrides nettime's default “no
commercial use without permission” notice an  is multi-licensed with all
those licenses listed at
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses#List_of_licenses



-- 
özgür k.
gpg:A3E6 57AD E14D 1F66 A546 6101 BA42 0724 E750 C5AE

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