Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Sal Randolph <sal AT highlala.com>]

On Feb 19, 2004, at 4:13 PM, Evan Prodromou wrote:

> Anyways, if you can't even claim that the work you're licensing is
> your own, and that you have rights to publish it, you should probably
> think twice about releasing it at all -- under Creative Commons, GFDL,
> or whatever.

By licensing the work in the first place, artists are stating that it 
is theirs to copyright and license.  I really feel that is sufficient.

From the music point of view, I just want to reiterate that making work 
with legally ambiguous samples puts artists in enough jeopardy as it 
is, and that I believe the warranties add too much additional legal 
liability.   Part of the whole point of all this, politically speaking, 
is to move back towards a cultural situation where we have the rights 
to comment freely on our cultural icons (ie Micky Mouse) and use them 
in our creative speech.   Adding liability for artists who work in 
these currently grey areas is antithetical to this idea.

The warranties won't and don't stop people from either sampling (imho, 
appropriate) or plagiarism (imo, inappropriate).  People who do either 
still face potential penalties.  All the warranties do is increase 
them.

From the point of view of blogs etc, it seems that the worst problems 
of people including plagiarized materials would likely be solved by 
simply removing the the material in question from the website.  I don't 
really see that the warranties either prevent these potential problems 
or aid in their solution.