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Free Culture

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Incompatible Niche Licenses

CC are working on a CC-Wiki license:

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002782.shtml
http://creativecommons.org/drafts/wiki_0.5

I admire the community spirit that this license is proposed in, and an inter-wiki license seems like a good idea, but it’s called the FDL. And a “credit the organisation not the individual” license is a dangerous thing to create (and probably breaks the Right Of Paternity). It’s going to get used for many non-wiki megalomaniac’s projects, and it breaks the social contract of wiki contribution anyway.

This is niche license proliferation. License proliferation is bad. A wiki-specific license is such a bad idea that Britannica should sponsor it (suggest it to them and watch their faces light up like a TV company executive told that CC licenses don’t effect moral rights). Wikis face quite a challenge in non-“fair use” jurisdictions, ghettoising their content will just add to their problems.

An authorship assignment or licensing toolkit would be more constructive.

(Incidentally, I’m against the Creative Archive license as well, it’s basically CC-BY-SA with a definition of NonCommercial that, taken literally, wouldn’t allow schools to use CA content).