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Calendar

See also Calendar.

July

date title

August

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September

date title

October

16 Jimmy at Depaul University, Chicago, Illinois (Colloquium talk about Wikipedia and Wikinews)
20-23 Jimmy in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil (ICML9)
28-29 Jimmy at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT)

November

December

January

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February

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March

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Gallery
 
Kalø Castle in Denmark, build in 1313.
By Malene Thyssen
 
A rich gold sari and woven fabric.
By Hautala
 
Westminster Tube station on the London Underground.
By ChrisO

<--

 
Buddha figure overgrown by fig in Wat Mahatat in Ayutthaya historic park, Thailand.
By Ahoerstemeier
 
Root Canal procedure: unhealthy tooth, drilling, filing with endofile, rubber filling and crown.
By Jeremy Kemp
 
A bee collecting pollen at the Del Mar fairgrounds.
By MarkSweep
 
Nuclear detonation from the "Tumbler Snapper" test series.
By Deglr6328
 
Costumed musicians in New Orleans during a Mardi Gras festival, 2003.
By Infrogmation
 
A dolphin surfs the wake of a research boat on the Banana River - near the Kennedy Space Center.
(Photo from NASA). By Solipsist
 
A Sawfly orchid in St. Elm, Mallorca.
By Orchi
 
A 2.5 kg brick is supported on top of a piece of aerogel weighing only 2 grams.
(Photo from NASA). By rian0918
 
Schematic illustration of an egg.
By Horst Frank
 
180° panorama of Alhambra court yard.
By Bernd Untiedt
 
Cherry tree in spring bloom.
By Barfooz



Opinion


Creative Commons -NC Licenses Considered Harmful

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Article status : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

Report by Erik Möller

When the Creative Commons project published its first licenses in December 2002, it finally brought a sense of unity behind the free content movement. Instead of many scattered licenses, creators now have the option to pick the right license for their work using a simple tool. They only have to answer basic questions like: "Allow commercial uses? Allow modifications?"

The tool then recommends one of the licenses developed by the Creative Commons team. They are legally sane, simple documents, specially adapted for various jurisdictions. In short, the Creative Commons project has made life a lot easier for everyone wanting to share content.

One particular licensing option, however, is a growing problem for the free content community. It is the allow non-commercial use only (-NC) option. The "non-commercial use only" variants of the Creative Commons licenses are non-free, and in some ways worse than traditional copyright law -- because it can be harder to move away from them once people have made the choice.

There may be circumstances where -NC is the only (and therefore best) available option, but that number of circumstances should decrease as the business models around free content evolve. The key problems with -NC licenses are as follows:

  • They make your work incompatible with a growing body of free content, even if you do want to allow derivative works or combinations.
  • They may rule out other basic uses which you want to allow.
  • They support current, near-infinite copyright terms.
  • They are unlikely to increase the potential profit from your work, and a share-alike license serves the goal to protect your work from exploitation equally well.

...


Hopefully, Creative Commons will contribute to the effort of educating content creators that the seemingly simple choice of forbidding commercial use is not so simple at all.

Erik Möller 2005. This article is in the public domain. Feel free to use it for any purpose. It is also a living document whose editable main copy resides at http://www.intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC. You are encouraged, but not required, to include this notice.




Ancient pyramids of stone

  ...


(...that wedgelike cleave the desert airs)