Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Sunir Shah" <sunir AT sunir.org>]

Thomas writes,

>> Copyrights are about morality, not legality.
> No. They are about money.

Money is about morality too, before we forget. But
to recycle something I just wrote to someone else:

Their original creation in the U.S. was to generate 
books, but in Europe they became also used for moral 
purposes. One reason why everything belongs to you is 
that people used to publish others' private journals, 
which is a serious invasion of privacy. Further, the 
Berne convention denies the ability to waive your 
fundamental moral rights. So, even if you sell your 
work, you cannot be defamed through that work, nor can 
your family after your death.

Copyright for online communities *is* about morality,
not about cash. It's there to allow people the legal
room to talk freely.

That is where I stand. You can disagree, as I'm sure
many of you do, but I'm more concerned with the moral
integrity of my membership.

> BTW: IMHO, you can't get a compilation copyright on a wiki, 
> because you do not compile the articles in any creative way. 
> Instead, you are just providing the space where people can drop 
> them in random order. But IANAL and TINLA.

It's not random. People link in appropriate, conscious, 
deliberate, organized ways. The question is, does the site 
have an overall compilation copyright or just each individual 
author who bothered to construct a link? After all, since 
linking is an intrinsic property of the medium, one can 
easily claim the authors made links consciously aware of
this for their own intent, versus the site making the 
creative choice to turn certain patterns of text into links. 

Even if you disagree that the script that the site uses
is sufficient proxy for to edit the compilation, the 
compilation copyrights are mostly anonymous, and anonymous 
copyrights default to the publisher until they can be 
adequately proven otherwise. What is considered adequate
varies by jurisdiction. I'm unclear what that actually 
entails, but in the U.S. it seems that you have to 
register the copyright.

SS