As we’ve mentioned, Shelley “Burningbird” Powers raised a number of excellent issues about the Creative Commons licenses and their interpretations. As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, it is easy to draw the conclusion that the CC licenses are more of a marketing effort for CC than a pioneering legal effort because the CC group tends to stay silent about practical questions involving the CC licenses while running victory laps every time a celebrity adopts a CC license or the number of licenses reaches another milestone.

Shelley, like me, lives in St. Louis, and we both have that Missouri “Show me” attitude toward things. However, I was surprised that the discussion Shelley initiated a while back and the conversation we at Between Lawyers had about applying a CC license drew nary a notice from the CC group.

Shelly’s latest effort, called "What We Hear" did raise the CC people from their slumber and I highly recommend Shelley’s post and the comments to it as a great resource on some of the practical issues involved in the CC licenses.

I think that Shelley by far has the best of the argument. As I mentioned when Between Lawyers decided to adopt a CC license, there is a disconnect between the way the CC licenses are presented and the actual language of the licenses. It is important to realize that the licenses tend to favor publishers and re-users rather than authors. That’s OK, but it’s not clear that everyone who applies these licenses understands that they do have legal consequences and that the licenses are more than a badge showing that you are a member of the CC club.

That said, there are also legal consequences of not having a CC or other kind of license. Those consequences might be OK with you, or they might not. For example, I prefer not to have a CC license on my personal blog. The CC licenses do not work for what I intend there and I prefer to retain as many rights as possible.

As Shelley points out, if you post a graphic showing use and non-use of CC licenses and suggest that the non-using world "is yet to be liberated," it raises some expectations about what's in the licenses, the benefits of them and the type of help you are likely to get from the CC in the case of disputes. As in all things, it's best to read the licenses carefully rather than to assume what they say from descriptions and summaries.

Shelley and others have asked us why Between Lawyers does not remove the CC license from our blog, especially in light of the lack of response from the CC group to issues we raised. That’s a fair question. The answer is this: we wanted to discuss the CC licenses, decide whether to apply one, apply it and report on our experiences – good and bad. That is the essence of our public CC experiment. If we document our experience, it will help others make sound decisions about the CC licenses.

Of the five of us, I am the one most likely to want to yank the CC license, but I’m committed to the experiment. I’m also encouraged that CC spokespeople are providing comments on Shelley’s blog.

As we’ve said, there are substantial benefits to the Internet community through standardization on a limited number of content licenses. CC is a laudable experiment in that regard, but CC also has some responsibility to spend some time helping licensees understand the practical impact of the licenses and determine how to treat specific issues that arise. If they do not do so, they need to "show me" how the CC licenses "liberate" me.

Shelley’s efforts have contributed greatly to the public good and I hope that the CC group answers her call. Even better, it'd be good if this leads to a larger discussion of a wider set of issues involving these topics.