Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>]

>>>>> "SR" == Sal Randolph <sal AT highlala.com> writes:

    Me> It's more "remixers" who tend to have concerns with these
    Me> warranties.

    SR> I'd just like to comment that "remixers" are not some minor
    SR> segment only applying to obscure electronic musicians.

Absolutely true. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

That said, _verbatim_ copying is relatively rare.

    SR> Any kind of parody or commentary which tries to make "fair use" of
    SR> copyrighted material is vulnerable to legal challenge in this
    SR> climate.

I know. Doesn't that suck? I hope we continue to build a corpus of
great Open Content work that people can count on to use, reuse, remix,
and redistribute. Then we can just toss out that ol' copyrighted stuff
(or wait for it to revert the public domain, and then use it again!).

But, of course, it takes care and attention to details to make that
happen. If we're sloppy about it in this early stage, or we conflate
Open Content with a lot of related but ancillary causes, we can queer
the deal and ruin the prospects of having Free Culture for ours and
future generations. Isn't that danger worth being just a teensy bit
more careful?

    SR> The warranties, as you point out, just make it easier to sue
    SR> artists for their creative acts, and I continue to think
    SR> that's a bad thing.

Actually, I think the main point is scaring the bejeesus out of
artists and making them think twice before releasing works. "Do I
really have rights to release this? Yes I do."

I think it's better than putting off that responsibility on the
consumers who use the artistic works, or redistributors like you and
me.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
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