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+<h2>Creative Commons Licences -- Why Precision Matters</h2>
+<p><em>(Last updated 2011-02-27)</em></p>
+
+<p>
+I frequently hear people refer to specific works as "Creative Commons licensed" or "under a Creative Commons licence." While this may be a perfectly valid description, it is also worse than useless because it not only provides almost no detail about the terms under which the work is licensed, but also serves to propagate the myth that the Creative Commons licences are similar in nature.
+
+The set of Creative Commons licences varies more widely than most other classes of licence -- they vary more widely than the set of free licences and they arguably vary more widely than EULAs, which tend to all say more or less the same thing. Yet, because they are published by the same organisation, people lump them together, referring to a work as "Creative Commons licensed" rather than giving actual detail regarding its licensing terms. Saying something is "Creative Commons licensed" is like telling a taxi driver that you want to go east; it just isn't specific enough to be of any use value whatsoever.
+
+The only characteristic shared among all Creative Commons licences is that they allow works to be shared verbatim, for non-commercial purposes only. Some of them do go further to allow modification, commercial use or both, but by referring to a work as being "under a Creative Commons licence," one doesn't communicate that. While noncommercial sharing is a valuable gem in today's culture of draconian copyright restrictions and DRM, it is not particularly useful by itself in many cases -- for example, the noncommercial restriction would prevent you from placing it on your blog if you display any advertising material from which you make money. For more good reasons <em>not</em> to use a noncommercial licence, please refer to <a href="http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC">this great article</a> by Erik Möller.
+
+So please, if you are talking to someone about a work under a Creative Commons licence, tell them specifically which one you mean -- don't just say "Creative Commons licensed," partly because that will give them no useful information at all, and partly because that is likely to confuse them into believing that all of the CC licences contain similar terms.
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+<h2>Articles</h2>
+
+<p>This section contains a collection of articles I have written.</p>
+
+<p>
+<a href="/articles/creativecommons.shtml">Creative Commons Licences -- Why Precision Matters</a>
+(Last updated 2011-02-27)
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