Development of Creative Commons licenses

[jbn AT forestfield.org (J.B. Nicholson-Owens)]

email AT greglondon.com wrote:
> GNU-GPL can only play with other GNU-GPL works.

Actually, there are a number of GPL-compatible licenses and the GPL you
apply to your copyrighted works can have additional clauses on it that allow
linking with particular GPL-incompatibly licensed works (it can be a pain to
get permission to do this if your program is a derivative of another program
though).  You just can't restrict the work any more than the GPL specifies
(like prohibiting one from distributing copies of the program for a fee as
you noted), but you can grant additional permissions.

> But I work with Perl a lot, and the Perl artistic license doesn't fly with
> GNU-GPL.

Does Perl use the Clarified Artistic License
(http://www.statistica.unimib.it/utenti/dellavedova/software/artistic2.html)?
The Clarified Artistic License is GPL-compatible.

Also, http://dev.perl.org/rfc/346.html says the Artistic License 2.0 was
being considered for Perl 6.

> I was actually surprised that Creative Commons had a No-Commercial use
> option on their license selection. It's an idea that was abandoned in most
> software open-source licenses some time ago.

Actually, the issue predates the open source movement by many years.  The
free software movement had already discussed the issue and reached these
conclusions for computer software well before the open source movement
began.

However, the Creative Commons licenses aren't for licensing software.
Different freedoms are important for different kinds of works; I believe
society is willing to trade away some freedoms in exchange for something
else (like trading away commercial distribution for non-commercial verbatim
distribution with pop song recordings--witness the original version of
Napster).

Also, modification and commercial distribution are not always desirable by
copyright holders who are willing to allow non-commercial verbatim
distribution in any medium.  Non-commercial verbatim distribution in any
medium is itself significantly more liberal than US copyright allows by
default.  Perhaps this is just another way of saying that I'm willing to
draw the line of acceptability in a different place than you are for some
kinds of works.

> If Creative Commons wanted to do ANYTHING that would help its cause, it
> should probably seriously consider removing Non-Commercial as an option on
> its licensing [...]

My guess is that allowing commercial distribution for all their licenses
would make their licenses a non-starter for a number of copyright holders
who have endorsed some aspect of their work (in particular some commercial
musicians who like the sampling licenses).

I'm all for encouraging copyright holders to choose more generous licensing
terms, don't get me wrong.  But at the same time, I would not want to forgo
permission to non-commercial verbatim distribution because I couldn't get
commercial distribution permission too.

I see it as a tradeoff.  If there was a way to fairly estimate whether this
tradeoff is real, I'd be interested to learn how many CC-licensed works I'd
forgo because the copyright holder wasn't willing to let me distribute their
work commercially.