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Rock star died before I could publish his latest work in a liberated way due to CreativeCommons dependency on Cloudflare (linkage.ds8.zone)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A rock star (who shall remain unnamed) told me he wanted to give away his latest work to the public domain. I helped him get the work in open non-proprietary formats.

I told him in principle that Creative Commons licensing would be what he is after, but that it has problems. Creative Commons license text contains links to the creative commons website which then hooks in more licensing terms. There is nothing wrong with the terms but the CC website is jailed in Cloudflare’s walled garden and the URL is part of the licensing text.

I told the artist he would be liberating his work but at the same time he would be technically subjecting users to a bullying US tech giant who makes content arbitrarily exclusive by shutting out some demographics of people and also abusing the privacy of those who are privileged to obtain access to the license text.

I suggested modifying the CC license to remove the CC URL and exclude Cloudflare from being a license gatekeeper, noting of course the big pitfall: if the work is not exactly CC, then it cannot use the CC name, thus the work cannot simply be treated as such by platforms which depend on the easy cookie-cutter CC license. The work cannot simply be copied to a platform that is designed for CC works.

But by rebelling he could perhaps make a splash by casting a spotlight on suppression by Cloudflare. The burden/encumberance of his unique license would trigger a discussion that might get Creative Commons to gain some wisdom and nix the hypocrisy of Cloudflare-dependent licensing.

The artist is a rebel at heart and so he agreed. But I did not act fast. Then he died unexpectedly. All of our discussions were verbal, so his will in this regard is undocumented and thus non-existent from a legal standpoint. I think this means the naturally copyrighted work in question is forever all rights reserved and cannot be liberated, correct?

Or is it a matter of tracking down who in his will inherits the rights to the works in his estate and seeing if they concur with a liberated release?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

If he wanted to give it to the public domain, you don't need creative commons. CC0 is public domain, but you don't need to use it, the copyright holder just needs to state "I dedicate this media to the public domain" and bam.

And any copyright they still have over their media isn't "forever", it will expire eventually. In the meantime, yes their estate likely has the rights, whoever that may be.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

There are jurisdictions in which public domain doesn't really exist (e.g. Germany) where you need something like CC0.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

I vaguely recall Richard Stallman bad-mouthing public domain in favor of free licensing. I don’t recall the details but I imagine the artist would at least want attribution, which I doubt the public domain ensures.

Of course if we could have predicted his death there are many trivial ways we could have ensured his will is expressed and executed. But it may not be a lost cause.. whoever controls the estate would likely know or believe that he wanted to liberate his work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Nawor3565’s comment is spot on.

About the link, though: You could link to Archive.org’s cached page of the license if you don’t want to directly link to the CC cloud flair page.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

That doesn’t really work. The URL is an inherent part of the CC license. Archive.org might do link replacement but that does not change the license.. it merely corrupts/misrepresents the license. Users of CC-licensed work are still bound by the actual text of the license. IIRC the URL was to refer to something that changes over time, thus making the license dynamic when archive.org works off of snapshots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Since the second half of a Wayback link is the original URL, a savvy user could easily visit that link when they want to.