Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

IMVVVHO Creative Commons seems to have undertaken at least three 
projects. There's explaining licenses. This is very useful: you're 
about to get Slashdotted for the GPL&LGPL explanations. The Public 
Domain explanation is useful, and I'd really like to see an "All Rights 
Reserved" explanation would help people understand the difference 
between all the other licenses and what their default rights and 
restrictions are. This would benefit closed content providers and 
consumer groups as well as prospective open content providers.

Then there's making licenses, and there's encouraging adoption of 
licenses. With the CC 2.0 licenses these two aims are in conflict. 
Modifying the licenses to encourage adoption is a good idea. But 
modifying them to encourage adoption by compromising people's choices 
or exposing them to risk unnecessarily is not a good idea.

A slight modification to 5a will take effort to sell to the bloggers 
who scream blue murder over having to claim authorship over their own 
work. A clarification that if you want to extract value from the 
commons by mixing other people's work and selling it (or preventing it 
being sold) then you probably need a different licensing mechanism or a 
better choice of license will also take effort to sell. But these 
measures will not compromise either the licenses or the advocacy, and 
in the long run it is work that must be done.

IMVVVHO I'm coming to the conclusion that CC needs fewer options in its 
own licenses, not more. Maybe even just a GPL-style license. Let others 
provide fig leaves for value extraction, CC can explain what's 
happening with other licenses and provide the tools, knowledge and 
advocacy for a real creative commons.

- Rob.