Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Brian Clark" <bclark AT radzone.org>]

First off, congrats on the new search engine, I've been playing around with
it some today. I thought, "What a great way to find pieces to collaborate
with ... I wonder if this is even a good clipart library?" The results that
I found suggest that it might be startlingly good for that -- but is
everything marked as "public domain" by a CC license really as public domain
as certified?

In the process, I stumbled upon a series of questions (that I couldn't find
answered at the CC site anywhere that I thought I'd post to the list) from
some of the stuff at Buzznet (www.buzznet.com), the photoblog site. When a
new user signs up and starts posting photos to their blog through that
service, the system (by default) publishes each of those with a CC public
domain license -- while the user can change that license, they aren't
notified that it is the default setting.

Therefore, a goodly majority of the photos (from landscapes to family photos
to paparazzi shots) are being published right now as "public domain" no
rights reserved, even though they may or may not have been certified as such
(as the user may or may not know that they have been published that way.)

But from a control panel, the user can change that ... so what happens if
three months later a user now providing photos (perhaps not realizing it) as
public domain changes their mind, and changes the CC license (automatically
across all their photos) to be "some rights reserved." Are people using it
under rights that weren't reserved before under a burden to discover that
change?

The question of online services that default to the least (ie, no) right
reserved but offer the potential to re-restrict those rights poses some
questions that I'm not sure there are answers to.

Has this been discussed somewhere else I'm just late to the party?



Brian Clark

(PS: I'm on daily digest mode, so forgive me if I'm slow to respond
on-list.)