Development of Creative Commons licenses

[email AT greglondon.com]

On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 09:56:34 -0800, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> For  non-software I'd much prefer people to choose non-free but non-all 
> rights reserved option than 
> all-rights-reserved-must-have-DRM-we-will-sue-you.  The current ecology 
> for software and other media are totally different.

Why is the argument always something to the effect of:
"at least its better than all-rights-reserved"

when the real question is:
"Does the license create a public commons?"

Anyone can feed off a public commons in whatever manner they wish.
The ShareAlike and CopyLeft licenses guarantee that no one can
actually TAKE anything out of the commons, and any improvements
made to a work must remain IN the commons. The cool thing about 
intellectual works is they are NOT a zero-sum-game. Someone
does not have to lose for someone else to gain. an intellectual
public commons can never lose no matter how many people feed off
of it and gain from it.

My main beef is that the name of teh website is "CreativeCommons.org"
not "SomeRightsReserved.org" or "BetterThanDRM.org"
and that the cover text talks about creating a public commons 
with their licenses, and the cover PICTURE is a friggen
cow eating in a public commons.

But Non-Commercial and Education-Only and Sampling-Only are 
NOT LICENSES THAT CREATE PUBLIC COMMONS.

Nothing in the website delineates between "public commons"
licenses and "at least better then DRM" licenses. So people
who come to the website think they're jumping on
the Public Commons bandwagon, create some work and then
license it 
  "CC-BY-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives-EducationOnly"
thinking they're now part of the Public Commons, but

IT AINT THE SAME THING

Am I the only one who sees a mismatch here???

If the intent of the website is at all reflected
in the name of the website, then CreativeCommons.org 
should be encouraging and pushing and explaining 
Public Commons licenses over licenses that, 
while better than all-rights-reserved-drm-or-sue, 
are little more than interesting advertising schemes
and have nothing to do with a public commons.

> The current ecology for software and 
> other media are totally different.

only because 'other media' is starting in the public
commons stuff a couple decades later than software did.
Richard Stallman started GNU 1984 with a text-editor 
for pete's sake. Linus Torvalds wrote a crappy Linux
kernel in 1991. RedHat didn't incorporate until 1999.

You at least have the benefit of twenty years of
people working out whether or not the world would
collapse if free-software took over the world.
(insert any proprietary propaganda statement here)

You also have the benefit of seeing what software
licenses didn't make it and which ones did.
You're not the first licensing group to propose
non-commercial or education-only clauses, but you might
not know that because the software projects that
lived under those licenses pretty much died out.

I believe that creative commons could bring 
'other media' to the same place software is now
in much less than the 20 years it took software,
because software worked out a lot of kinks and
proved the concept for you folks.

But if you want your destination to be a public
commons like Linux is, then your licenses have
to aim for a public commons from the beginning
or your going down the wrong path.

at-least-its-better-than-drm will not create
a linux-sized ecology of art, music, and literary
works.