This incident shows that CC evangelists can be just as controlling and litigious as the conventional copyright holders they inveigh against. So much for making the world more equitable and accessible.
"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump personal property in the public highway, there is nothing that permits the dumping of intellectual property into the public domain — except as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire. Until those copyrights expire, there is no mechanism in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain."
Funnily enough, it is Creative Commons Zero that does what is asked for the best.
The photographer explicitly didn't want it to be used freely. He wanted it be used for free only by people who gave him credit for his work, which is why he used a license that said so. Per the article: “I’m happy to see my photos spread around, but I demand proper attribution. It’s not much for a free photo.”
> This incident shows that CC evangelists can be just as controlling and litigious as the conventional copyright holders they inveigh against. So much for making the world more equitable and accessible.
Why are you railing against people who fight for CC licenses? Surely it is better than conventional copyright holders, who charge you for any use of their work? Are you against copyright law as a whole, and believe everything should be in the public domain?
Creating and maintaining any commons requires rules and work. CC evangelists do want people to use their work, but they also want to create a situation where lots of people use lots of other people's work, which means getting creators to be comfortable offering their creations. CC does a great job of capturing and expressing the common concerns of creators, which makes more work available. But that only works in the long run if those concerns are truly honored.
So I don't think they're being hypocrites at all. You may prefer to release your stuff into the public domain. (Funnily, you don't link your PD-shared works in your profile, so you must not want people to use your work freely either.) But others prefer differently. Looking at Flickr, it looks like the CC-licensed collection is about 100x larger than the PD-licensed collection:
That's likely because CC-licensing has been available on Flickr since 2008 [0] and they only recently started offering the Public Domain license as an option in 2015 [1].
It's good to see them finally offer more license types but they are so late to the game that many people like me just self-published or posted to Wikimedia Commons under the PD license instead, for all those years. I'm sure my images get fewer views than they would on Flickr but I can't be bothered to switch now.
[0] https://www.flickr.com/commons [1] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/03/30/flickr-now-offers-publi...
You are free to harass people about licensing if you want, but you don't then get to turn around and claim you're fighting the good fight against overly restrictive copyright law.
If you're litigating against small-time festival organizers for not putting fine print on a poster picture, you're much closer to the Warner Music end of the spectrum rather than the Richard Stallman end of the spectrum in terms of copyright.
Both CC and open-source software use the framework of existing copyright law to guarantee a "fair" use of works, with only few restrictions. Not without any restrictions.
I maybe should not have responded with this provocative question, but to me both movements use very similar tools for similar purposes.
You said it much better than I ever could :). And that's why I used the comparison to the GPL, especially since that has a history of the FSF going to court over violations.