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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: The Copyleft Office
  • Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 18:54:50 -0400 (EDT)


Rob Myers said:
> On 17 Aug 2004, at 18:39, Greg London wrote:
>> Not even GNU-GPL or ShareAlike place a work in a commons.
>> They retain enough restrictions to prevent copyright forks, etc.
>
> But they also ensure the maintenance and continued growth of a
> (pseudo-)commons. BSD doesn't create a commons, it creates a buffet.

I keep wavering between prefering Public Domain Licenses
to prefering Copyleft Licenses. I think I eventually settled
on a bare-minimum copyleft (fewest rights reserved to the
author) but with other advantages instead (liability protection
and patent exemption). This was what I tried to get at with
my long, rambling document "Drafting the Gift Domain".
The idea of creating (drafting) legislation that would create
a Gift Domain under which copyrightable works could be placed.
Think of it as having Congress create a "Copyleft Office".

Individuals who are willing to donate their time and effort,
who are willing to donate their software, their music, their
art, their writings, into this Gift Domain, must surrender
all rights to their works, and must register the work in its
entirety into some branch of teh Copyright Office.

All derived works must remain in this Gift Domain.
No attribution, no notices, no advertising, no nothing.
It is the barest minimum Copyleft possible.

In exchange for being willing to contribute your work to
this Gift Domain as sanctioned by Congress,
you are granted complete liability protection,
and your work is exempt from any patent restrictions.

Software placed in the Gift Domain (or registered with
the Copyleft office) would be excluded from patent restrictions.

Patents would still be recognized, but a software implementation
placed in the Gift Domain would be be allowed by anyone.

The Constitution granted Congress the power "To promote
the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

This does not demand that the rights secured by of a
market-economy basis. So, the idea of a Copyleft office
would be to secure a minimalist set of rights in order
to promote the progress of Arts and Sciences via a
Gift-Economy.

I called it the "Gift Domain" as a spin on "Public Domain",
but maybe I should ahve called it the "Copyleft Office"
or something similar.

So far, the idea doesn't seem to have caught on.







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