Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Chris Morris <chrismo AT clabs.org>]

Scott Johnston wrote:

Has there been discussion at Creative Commons (or elsewhere) of developing a license that makes a distinction between public and private copying?  Something that extends the fair-use privileges protected by the Sony video tape decision to allow a person to privately distribute copies to their associates, but forbids them from making it available to the public?

Would such a license have any value?

Every CC license allows others [http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/fullrights]

• to copy the work
• to distribute it
• to display or perform it publicly
• to make digital public performances of it (e.g., webcasting)
• to shift the work into another format as a verbatim copy

So you'd want an option to take away public copying, which would, IMO, kill 1, 2, 4 & 5 in the above list. Which leaves only public performances, which I don't see anyone wanting to allow only that option, but maybe you would.

If you kill all of the above options, then, AFAICT, you've killed every CC license, because the optional parts of CC licenses are dependent on public copying. Attribution is irrelevant if you can't make copies, commerical use is also irrelevant, modifications are irrelevant.

So, maybe you want a license that allows only public performances and private fair-use? In that case, I guess I don't see a need to explicitly license fair use since fair use works now without explicit licensing by anyone.

-- 
Chris
http://clabs.org