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cc-licenses - Re: Temporary Internet Publishing License (TIP license)

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: jbn AT forestfield.org (J.B. Nicholson-Owens)
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: Temporary Internet Publishing License (TIP license)
  • Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 16:37:17 -0600

Toni Goeller wrote:
> - The owner of a copy may make copies for personal use, but may not give
> them to others. (Everybody can download the work for her/himself, as long as
> it is published on the Internet.)

I don't like this provision because it means I can't take advantage of what
computers are so good at doing--sharing information with my neighbor. The
other CC licenses let me be a good neighbor and share, even if only
non-commercially, anytime I want for as long as I want to continue sharing.

I can't imagine this provision would be helpful to anyone trying to
incorporate CC-licensed works into free software either, as copying is a
prerequisite for the covered work being free. I think this is important to
the CC folks because of previous posts indicating they are working on making
some subset of their licenses compatible with free documentation licenses,
In a more general ideological vein, it seems to me that CC is trying to move
more copyrighted works into the hands of the public to legally let the
public do things they want to do. This also seems to me to be compatible
with a driving idea behind free software as well. Yet this provision is
designed to work against that motivation.

> - The online publisher (the person responsible for hosting the work) is
> granted temporary publishing rights by the author (or the person holding the
> rights to publish the work electronically). When the temporary publishing
> rights are revoked, the online publisher has to remove the work from all his
> web servers within 2(?) months.

This sounds like something to me that is better handled in a contract
between the copyright holder and the particular distributor of the work.
This doesn't concern anyone outside those two parties.

But on a technical level it looks entirely unenforcible because there are
any number of web search engines and individuals who will index the content
of a website and distribute information from these indices (Google's cache
is a limited example of such a function, the Wayback Machine is a
larger-scale version of this, both are considered incredibly helpful and
worthwhile).

> - The online publisher has to provide the author (or owner of publishing
> rights) with download statistics of her/his work though without complete IP
> addresses (to protect privacy). Failure to do so automatically terminates
> publishing rights within 6 months.

Again, this seems to be of interest only a distributor and the copyright
holder, so I can't imagine this being very useful for the public at large.

Also, weblogs are deceiving. There are many major groups of visitors behind
proxies where you will never know how many of them acquired copies of the
covered work. AOL, for example, has many proxies by which the majority (I'm
guessing) of AOL subscribers download webpages.

This normal and beneficial proxying function might be viewed as a copyright
infringement if a copyright holder were to strictly interpret the suggested
provisions.




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