Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Lawrence Lessig <lessig AT pobox.com>]

Peter, thanks for the email, and the ideas. [Glenn/Neeru: please see below
and especially where indicated]. Replies below.

On 12/6/02 10:40 PM, "Peter Wayner" <pcw AT flyzone.com> wrote:

> 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.

We are completely open to more options down the road. Our idea is to open
with these, and see what the market demands as we go.
> 
> * 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.

This is a nice idea for us to explore.

> 
> * 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.

That would be fantastic, and we'd be happy to make that part of the
announcement. Adding a format vector to the rights would require some work
which we can't do at the moment. But it is something to consider for the
future. 

> 
> * 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.

Absolutely, that's done (though we don't like to call it DRM, better DRE:
expression, not management). Glenn/Neeru: If this isn't obvious, we need to
make it clearer. 

> 
> * 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.)

Glenn/Neeru: Great point.

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

Thanks for the help.



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