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cc-licenses - Thoughts on the license

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Peter Wayner <pcw AT flyzone.com>
  • To: lessig AT pobox.com, licenses AT creativecommons.com
  • Subject: Thoughts on the license
  • Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 08:40:27 -0500

I got an invitation to your party next Monday, but it just won't
be possible to attend because I'm on the other side of the country.
If you plan an event out here, I would be glad to help. In fact,
you definitely should for PR reasons.

In any case, here are some thoughts in no particular order:

* More bits in the rights vector may make it more complicated, but
it could also make the scheme more attractive.

* For instance, I could see a band wanting to release a song and
give radio stations the right to play it without paying any royalties.
Then they would retain the rights to sell other copies. This isn't
exactly non-commercial and it's not exactly verbatim. I guess the
real problem would be defining the difference between a radio station
and a P2P node. This distinction may be so complicated that you don't
want to let it mess up your license, but if you could I think you
would find many willing bands who would embrace it.

* I was planning on releasing _Free for All_ in electronic form with
the right to make free electronic copies but no right to make printed
ones. (still not public: http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/index.php)
This was just to prevent someone from issuing a paperback edition
without my say so. Now I'm weighing using your non-commercial license
because it may be close enough to what I want. I'll mull it over.
Again, it would be cool if you could have bits that controlled the
format of the copies, but this may create other problems.

* Has anyone created the XML Schema/DTD for the DRM in RDF? I checked
the link, but it just went to a general page about some XML formats.
If I missed it, you might try to put in a more explicit link.

* You might want to include a question in the FAQ about changing
the license over time. Several open source projects change the license.
You've probably addressed this somewhere, but it's one of my first
questions. Could I, for instance, revoke one of your licenses and
go back to strict copyright? (This has deep implications about censorship
too because in the past it was hard to "unpublish" something. Now
you just need to delete it from the website, google and the wayback
machine.)


Thanks again for all of your hard work on this important topic.

-Peter











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