Displaying licenses: a boardsie debate

aidan_walsh

I'm putting this here, because it seems to me to be a more approporiate forum than any other I can think of (polluted it AH, and it also covers photography, music, software, etc so it couldn;t sit alone in any of those forums). If the mods think there is a better place for it, then feel free to move.



Licenses are a fact of life when it comes to using a computer.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned software licenses implictly, as these days licenses are applied to all forms of digital media, be it software, audio, video, imagery, or text. However, these "new media licenses" all take roughly the same form. They tell you what you are allowed to do, and what you are not. But they don't do it well. Often times they are full of legal jargon. People won't read all this. If nothing else, it can be very daunting looking. There has to be a way of better representing the license to people.

Most of the elements of a license are common sense, especially when it comes to the copyright (or copyleft) of the item in question, but sometimes there are a lot more to it than meets the eye of even people who are clued in, let alone the poor unfortunate who is coming into all this for the first time.

In some ways an alternative already exists. The Creative Commons family of licenses offer a basic screen that offers the main points of the license in bulletin form. Images beside the text offer a graphical summary of the text, so the reader can immediately jump to any point of interest without having to search reams of text for the one or two lines they want to check. And as well as the summarized versions, they link to the full text of the license, so that legal types can browse if they so wish. And on top of all of it, they have machine readable versions that people can link to, and format or parse in any manner they wish. You can see an example using the GNU GPL 2.0 here, with the "traditional version" here.
In some ways its wonderful, its a brief yet comprehensive analysis of the license. In other ways, there is still a lack. The language of the licenses can still be a bit much, although with the reduced amount it can seem less daunting that it may have originally.

"The Plain English Campaign is an independent pressure group fighting for public information to be written in plain English." They define plain English as "language that the intended audience can understand and act upon from a single reading."

Surely some combination of the two can be used to simplify peoples understanding of licenses better, the graphical advantages of the Creative Commons condensed format, and the guidelines of the Plain English Campaign determining the text. I have often seen questions arising on internet forums about licenses, and what a certain paragraph means. The answer usually starts with the words "basically what it means is..." Why not use the rest of this responce as the text that we present to users? It would certainly clear up a lot of the ambiguity that often surrounds a license.

So whats your take on this? Do you think that people are more likely to read and properly accept (as opposed to just click through and forget) licenses if we make the effort to show them to them in a way that they can understand?