[GOAL] BLOG: Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows?

[Andrew A. Adams]

> > The copyleft or "share-alike" principle does not prevent enclosing something in a paywall,
> 
> By this fact, it becomes clear that CC-BY-SA is not the "correct" license for academic work.

Quoting a single line of a longer piece out of context is both mis-leading 
and rude. If you'd bothered to read past this one line and see the whole 
argument you might have understood that while it doesn't prevent it directly 
it undercuts any attempt to "proprietise" by first denying an exclusive 
right, provided someone, anyone, else has the original piece and makes it 
available - the original author, their institution, the Internet Archive... 
It also further udnercuts the incentive to even try because the organisation 
putting it behind a paywall is not permitted to prevent further dissemination 
for anyoine who has accessed it through the paywall.

We have large numbers of clear examples of how copleft/share-alike works in 
Free Software. There is very little Libre Software that is not also available 
gratis. Even where ther are organisations charging for access to derivative 
versions, the share-alike principle generally prevents them from doing more 
than charging for their real value-added changes because anyone who pays then 
gains the right to re-distribute the derivative version.

Besides which, my response was about a discussion which concluded that CC-BY 
was the correcct license. I disagree and argued for CC-BY-SA or in a few 
cases CC-BY-ND. I explained why CC-BY-NC is not a good license because of its 
utter lack of clarity in what it means.




-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/