Richard Stallman dismisses Creative Commons:

Stallman does have some interesting things to say about Creative Commons, the open license for content that bloggers love to talk about, but don’t love to adopt. Creative Commons is a powerful idea, and an interesting non-profit organization. It’s also rejected by Stallman, though the reasons may surprise you.

(For those of you who don’t know who he is, see Stallman’s wikipedia entry.)

Interesting article with regards to Creative Commons, in that he points out its biggest single flaw — that people tend to see it as a single licence — while acknowledging its flexible capabilities. Then he goes on to dismiss it entirely, but that’s pretty much expected for RMS, free software extremist that he is.

Creative Commons is an interesting concept: basically they believe that our current copyright laws are fundamentally broken thanks to successive lobbying, time extensions and “hamonisation”. (UK & IoM is now author’s death + 70 years for audio.) As a result, they propose a flexible licencing system to allow content creators to “give back” some rights, such as the ability to legally freely share the content with friends, sample/create derivative works, etc.

We’re thinking of releasing some of our artists’ work under Creative Commons, possibly the Sampling or Share Music licences, and have discussed it at a few meetings. It’s early days yet, and these things always take ages to agree on, but everyone recognises that it has potential. We’d appreciate any comments that anyone has — what do you think?