Enforcing a license is nasty

Doing a bit of reading on the Creative Commons criticism and came across this notice by Nina Paley

Nina released the film Sita Sings the Blues under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and quickly realized that people do not understand or follow the license terms

This is a real problem. Some artists have re-released Sita remixes under Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses. Many bloggers and journalists assume the non-commercial restrictions…

This means that she has two choice: to ignore what is going on or to react. While ignoring makes her wishes and control moot reacting is not always fun:

Initially I tried to explain what “ShareAlike” means to CC-NC remixers of “Sita”, and asked them to please switch to ShareAlike, per the terms of the ShareAlike license under which I released it. I felt like an ass; I don’t want to be a licensing cop. After a while, mis-identifications of the project’s license became so widespread I gave up trying to correct them. “Creative Commons” means “Non-Commercial” to most people. Fighting it is a sisyphean task.

This is an interesting problem. Many creators do not want to police their licenses (nor do they have the funds to do so) additionally any attempts to police the licenses reduces their gesture of sharing. The creators become less nice people since enforcers are less nice than people who give us what we want. Also it is a thankless task to attempt to educate a world who has no intention of listening.

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