We all know the feeling: if we want to continue the installation, the registration, or whatever, we have to click “yes, I agree” but the last thing we want to do is to read plenty of pages of legalese and check them for loopholes. So we just click ‘yes’, agreeing to the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) even when we might consent to sell our grandmother …
It could be different. Creative commons licence is a one of several public copyright licenses which comes in different flavours. A work can be copyrighted – or to be more accurate copylefted! – under creative commons. There are seven regularly used types of creative commons licenses[1].
With this standardisation of copyleft, it is very easy for an end user to know immediately what he can do and what not with the work.
The same could be applied for the EULA. Let’s say seven different forms of EULA for registering on a website and twelve for installing an app. The end user would immediately see if there are any costs involved, if data is sold to a third party, etc.
If the EULA is not one of the seven EULA commons, the thing is fishy and one has to do some web search before installing the app or registering on the site.
But if the EULA is a EULA commons, the decision will be a true and quick decision.
EULA commons would be a very helpful thing.
Yes, I agree.
1 E.g. a work might be licensed under creative commons Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives version 3.0, in short CC BY-NC-ND. For details, see https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions