[cc-licenses] Attribution license
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Oct 2 14:14:05 EDT 2006
Nic Suzor wrote:
> Using Greg's use cases, I don't believe that the attribution only
> licence should prohibit DRM. If ShareAlike-Sam creates content which
> he is happy for anyone to use, in practically any way, as long as
> they give him credit, I can't read in an extra restriction that says
> 'as long as you're not DRM-Dave (or microsoft, or whoever)'. The very
> permissive nature of this licence shouldn't discriminate on fields
> of use - from the free software perspective, people who use the
> revised-BSD style licences are more than happy for their code to be
> reused in proprietary, locked-up platforms.
You may be correct that not restricting DRM distribution is more consistent
with the principles of the By license, but let's be clear: this is NOT a
question of "use restrictions" but of "distribution restrictions". The
various free software definitions all allow distribution restrictions in
principle.
Of course, the assumption that what people who use BSD licenses want
should be comparable to what people who use CC-By want is a common, but
not necessarily accurate assumption. People using CC-By, know that even
if the work is bound up with proprietary materials, it will generally be
possible to extract it (because it's targeted to media such as visual
arts and music which are directly sensible to the user). It's not
clear that anyone is counting on that, but they may be (after all, if
you really don't care, you can *use* the BSD license for music or art,
or you can just grant it to the public domain if you also don't care
about attribution).
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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