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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: CC 2.0
  • Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2004 21:21:35 +0000

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.





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