[Flora-help] re: Creative Commons requirement on flora.org sites

Hi Russell,

I wondered if you could help me understand more clearly what your thinking
is that is behind the CC license requirement for the flora.org sites.

You wrote:
>   b) Are all the pages intended by their creators to be copied
>royalty-free for non-commercial usage (can't make a book out of it without
>additional permission) verbatim (no changes being done without additional
>permission) on the Internet?  This should be understood as the minimum on
>the Internet, and is also the Creative Commons license called:
>   Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License Canada

I don't quite follow why you believe this should be the minimum on the web.
I make a distinction between the technical copying of a webpage for it to be
displayable on individual computer screens under the original URL or indexed
by search engines, and the copying that is a re-using of a piece of writing
on a different site than where the author originally placed it. Obviously,
the copyright law needs to take into account the technical necessities of
the web, but the second kind of copying is what the non-technical think of
when they think of authors' copyright, and that's what I'm talking about
when I use the word "copying" here.

It makes sense to me that informational text should be freely copyable.
Articles that include original thought, though, have a different kind of
intellectual value. I think there are instances in which an author may
prefer to keep their writing on the site of origin and not want an article
of theirs incorporated into a website with which they may not want to be
associated. As I understand it, the Creative Commons license allows people
to copy entire articles to their own site, so authors using a Creative
Commons license wouldn't be able to make that reservation. Are you saying
that this is how it should be on the web? That if an author doesn't want
their article published on an objectionable site they shouldn't put it on
their own site to begin with?

There's also the question of web traffic.  Even when it's verbatim,
attributed and for non-commercial purposes, the person would still be
copying something of intellectual value from the site of origin and
incorporating that value into a new site without having to inform the
author. Since the content of a site is what brings visitors to that site, it
seems to me that it could, in effect, divert readers of a particular author
away from the author's site if users can find the same content just as
easily somewhere else first. Even when money isn't involved, intellectual
value and web traffic still are, so I think some authors will prefer to have
a quote with a link that directs users to the site of origin rather than
licensing in this way.

Just trying to understand whether your perspective is different from my own
or whether I haven't interpreted it correctly.

:-)
Marian

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[Flora-help] re: Creative Commons requirement on flora.org sites