Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Friday, March 19, 2004, at 03:06PM, <email AT greglondon.com> wrote:

>one big problem, as I see it, is that the vocabulary
>doesn't yet quite match up with the intent. "open" and
>"free" and "public" are all trying to describe somethign
>that is really best called a "gift". Hence the name of the
>document is "Drafting the Gift Domain", which is like
>Public Domain, but rather than having rights expire and
>enter a Public Domain, authors GIFT their rights to a gift
>domain so that people can use them immediately.

IMVHO, "gift" will send people running more surely than "free". I think 
"shared" is better because it's what one actually does by participating in 
free/open/commons/gift culture.

Technically, "defensively copyrighted" is a good description: 
free/open/commons/gift contributors copyright their work to prevent its use 
being limited, traditional "offensively copyrighted" work is designed to 
limit its use.

The GPL as an ironization of copyright law is a nice angle as well.

>Drafting the Gift Domain was intended for any Author who
>wished to contribute their Writing to a Gift Economy, be
>it music, or software, or literature, or whatever.
>
>I'm looking for feedback on the document from people "in
>the know" about open content. Any comments welcome. Please
>send them to me off-list.

It's an excellent document, thank you for producing it. I was interested to 
see that you settled on GPL and BSD for quite different reasons from myself. 
:-)

One point I'd make is that having shared cultural material available helps 
companies in easily costablke ways: it's usually quicker and cheaper to add 
to something that already exists than to start from scratch. Making 
modifications open as well can be regarded as payment. I've worked at 
startups, and on new projects in existing companies, and if open 
source/content isn't available it takes a lot more work to get going. Sadly 
this goes against the asset-stripping mindset of much contemporary business. 
:-(

- Rob.