Creative Commons has an issue. It endorses nonfree licenses. Officially, it says that they wish for nonfree licenses to be stepping stones to free licenses.

But in practice, that doesn't happen. Creators stay on nonfree licenses. This ends up polluting the brand, to the point that people now instinctively associate Creative Commons with their most restrictive licenses – non-commercial and non-derivative, rather than their most free.

The organisation's own behaviour doesn't help. They showcase and use such nonfree works on their own websites. They ignored calls from other organizations such as Question Copyright to abandon nonfree licenses. Now, it's decades too late, and the culture has set in.

Due to AI (of course), the organization has had a push recently to redefine openness. They now want to focus on equity, and reciprocity. Sounds good, but it's not about openness and freedom. By focusing on contradictory goals, seemingly as a knee-jerk reaction to AI, they risk destroying the very foundation of their organisation.

For example, they advocated for “AI preferences”. They justify it by saying that it's not copyright, it's voluntary. A creator (let's call them Amy) that uses CC BY-SA licenses rightly pointed out that this would be pointless without enforcement, and so advocated for AI preferences to be legally enforced. Is this not simply reinventing copyright under a different name?

Amy also lamented being prevented from enforcing their preferences on AI on their readers because of the Creative Commons license they use, that prevents creators from putting more restrictions on users. I'm not sure how they're not able to see the hypocrisy; there's a reason why the license prevents you from doing so, directly showing that it's contradictory to be pro-free-culture and pro-enforced-AI-preferences at the same time.

Because of these two, I have a pretty low opinion of the Creative Commons organization nowadays. I opt to use the Free Art License instead. It's inspired by the GPL, so it's a free, attribution-sharealike license, with no option to add other restrictions. Perfect! And the brand isn't polluted by being associated with nonfree licenses.