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Is creative commons viral? If not, I'm guessing that around now a lot of people are repenting and wishing they had listened to RMS et al.



Creative Commons isn't one license, it's six. There's a handful of clauses that can be mixed and matched to form a license:

* BY: Attribution requirement, every CC license has this

* SA: Share-alike, aka "copyleft", RMS-style "virality"[0] but without a source code requirement since that is impractical outside of software.

* NC: NonCommercial, license only covers not-for-profit usecases and filesharing

* ND: License does not allow derivative works

These can be combined like so:

* CC-BY

* CC-BY-SA <- This one was used by StackOverflow!

* CC-BY-ND

* CC-BY-NC

* CC-BY-NC-SA

* CC-BY-NC-ND

Only the first two are "RMS compatible" licenses.

[0] Copyright is already viral, share-alike/copyleft clauses just patch the virus to attack itself. It's the "treating your leukemia with HIV" of licensing.


> without a source code requirement since that is impractical outside of software.

Preferred form for editing is practical for any content that is edited in digital form; if it is impractical at all, its for works where editing is done to some non-digital artifact which is then digitized, and where the norm for further modifications would be the same, and where the digital form is itself not renderable back into the artifact. But I can't think of any real examples.


Thank you!


That's how I, NAL, read "share-alike": derivative work needs to be shared again instead of walled off.


In which case they can't stop people using the outputs of their LLMs to create new ones. But I guess it'll need to be decided in court, and their plan is to achieve dominance (or enough of a lead to guarantee it, which is the same thing) before others start trying.




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