The case for standardized open licenses
Peter Suber,
Open Access News,
Sept 04, 2009
Peter Suber takes TechDirt's Mike Masnick to task for saying "I don't use any of their licenses, because I don't necessarily see the point. We've declared in the past that the content here is free for anyone to do what they want with it, and thus I feel no need for a Creative Commons license." Suber responds, "The need arises from the reality that sharing without standardized legal tools doesn't scale." Um, OK, but look what standardized licenses buy me: everyone (and not just regular readers) now they can reuse my stuff; software engines know they can reuse my stuff; and communities or institutions that require legal certainty know they can use my stuff. You know, this argument makes me rethink the value of standardized licenses at all, because the only people who seem to actually benefit are the mechanized reblog spammers. The "it doesn't scale" argument doesn't work for the 99.9 percent of us who are only writing to a smallish community or family. It works for the industrialists and the broadcasters and the propagandists. People who deal in mass messaging. Related: the contrary view, Scale is the oxygen that feeds collaboration.
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