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Concerns over undesirable reuse

The second broad category of concern over CC licensing pertains to undesirable reuse. This generally takes two sub-categories of its own: politically undesirable reuse and commercially undesirable reuse, although in the case of the latter, particularly, this is a case of: ‘undesirable for whom?’ Let us begin with politically undesirable reuse.

In an article at the extreme fringe of such claims, but one that can be applied more moderately, Robert Dingwall makes the accusation that ‘open access is good news for neo-Nazis’.40 In a ﬁne instance of Godwin’s law – a humorous axiom of the internet that ‘as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one’41 – Dingwall hypothesises a paper about a (ﬁctional) group of neo-Nazi racists:

This might well result in a journal paper which demonstrates that the group’s members are not demons but ordinary men and women responding to economic and social challenges with strategies that seem reasonable to them, even if based on partial information or analysis by others’ standards. . . For the author, the paper presents evidence that it is unhelpful to dismiss these people as bigots: the political system needs to recognize and address their grievances, without adopting their racist solutions. With a CC-BY [sic] licence, however, nothing stops the group taking hold of the paper, editing it down and using it as a recruitment tool: ‘Famous professor says we are just ordinary people responding in a reasonable way to the problems of our community. . .’ 42

This argument does not seem particularly solid. For one, such a group could likely attempt a claim under ‘criticism and review’ fair dealing provisions anyway, as do news outlets (it would be libel for which they could be taken to court, not for their actual use of the material). While Dingwall’s claims are perhaps too extreme to be credible, one might consider undesirable use by more mainstream parties, whether fringe or even moderate, and the problems that this could have for the neutrality of research work.

The second concern over undesirable reuse surrounds commercial appropriation. Building on the remarks in Chapter 2, this requires a little more time to unpack as it is, itself, split across two different axes: a wholesale rejection of any kind of utilitarian appropriation of humanities work, or an antipathy towards speciﬁc commercial