Development of Creative Commons licenses

[email AT greglondon.com]

On Sat, 7 Feb 2004 01:30:27 -0600, J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote:
> 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.

someone who is doing a non-commercial license in the hopes
of getting paid by someone for a commercial license to their
work is NOT, repeat NOT, adding to the creative public commons.

You're missing the point of open source. people give up proprietary
license to their work to the point where the public can benefit
from it verbatim and can benefit by making additions to it.
You benefit from those additions too, since its share-alike,
so you can roll the changes into your original.

yes, some people will NOT use a CC-BY-SA license on their work
if that's all that's available, but these people are not interested
in contributing a work to the commons, the public pool. They want
to be able to license a proprietary version to anyone willing to
pay for it.  That's not a commons. That's using free copy-distribute
to get free advertising. It's like microsoft saying they have an 
opensource license on their software, but the source code is still
proprietary.

It's microsoft proprietary thinking applied to open source.

If you want to see stories written and music
recorded, and then movies or shorts made based
on those stories, using that music, then 
Creative Commons needs to encourage a commons,
not a free-advertising-hope-someone-buys-my-song
license.

I originally thought Creative Commons was forwarding
the idea of a public commons of audio, video, text,
ideas, and the like that people can build on and 
contribute to, to the point where it snowballs
into something big. But the NonCommercial license,
the Sampling license, and the Educational only,
license are all creating proprietary works with
free advertising, and that will never snowball
into anything.

'some' rights may be better than 'no' rights,
but it isn't enough to change the scene
because it still boils down to the old
proprietary model of "mine, mine, mine".
You may be willing to draw the line there,
but don't expect to find any massive pools
of Sampling works in the future. the contributers
have to give up enough rights to their work that
it becomes part of teh COMMONS for it to snowball.

you're only kidding yourself if you think
the sampling license is going to change
anything on a major scale, a public scale.

My perl training manual is CC-BY-SA. meaning you
could put it into print and even sell copies of it. 
you could even add more examples and new sections,
but they would be share-alike too, so the public 
would benefit from that. The document gets better
because I gave up enough control of it that everyone
benefits, not just me.