Thread:Copyleft/share-alike (6)

Hi Kim,

I'm not sure whether I'd go as far as to say that attribution undermines the free culture movement. I don't see that the ethic of recognising the building blocks of new or reconfigured knowledge is intended to undermine the free knowledge movement.

I do agree that in many contexts (cultural and otherwise) that attribution may not be required or appropriate.

Regarding Creative Commons - in the early days attribution was an option selected by the copyright holder. I understand that in 98% of the licenses users chose to require attribution and they dropped this as an optional restriction of the license.

Perhaps we should lobby for reintroducing "BY" as an optional restriction in the CC license?

While licensing is important - I think that sometimes we spend too much time grappling with the idiosyncrasies of different licenses at the expense of widening the base of libre knowledge. Licensing is a mechanism or tool to deal with the ludicrous situation of copyright insofar as knowledge is concerned. I view copyleft licenses as a clever hack to deal with the problem of copyright and focus more energy on building capacity and community to achieve a free curriculum.

Cheers