Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Scott Johnston said:
> At one-time I thought it rather difficult to tease apart commercial
> from non-commercial use with a copyright permission notice.  But
> Creative Commons has taken a big step in formalizing that.  Hence my

and not everyone thinks this is a good thing.

> curiousity if a distinction between private and public distribution
> (copying) can similarily be formalized into a copyright permission
> notice.

the fact that you lump distribution(copying) together says you're
missing the distinction. To copy is to create instances of a thing.
To distribute is to cause an instance to change owners.

If you want private copying along a betamax/fair use decision,
then you could grant anyone the right to Copy the work,
but withold the right to Distribute the work.

> Note, I'm not referring to personal copying (but you were not confused
> by that).  I want to allow almost anything short of globally anonymous
> distribution.  I want to allow e-mail friends to be able to make a
> copy.  I want to allow a teacher to be able to distribute a copy to
> each student.  I wouldn't quibble if a university allowed distribution
> to its entire student body.  But I especially want to allow a group of
> friends to give each other copies, so they can share the use of the
> copyrighted work without breaking the law.

This is a LowQuantityDistribution (CC-LQD) license.
To what end, I have no idea.
"Anyone may distribute N copies of this work" for some value of N.

You apparently support NonCommercialOnly licenses, plus you mention
EducationOnly with your teacher/student example. This, plus your
LQD license point to a place that is neither a
Gift Economy (open source, copyleft, public domain, sharealike)
nor a Market Economy (all rights reserved, CC-FreeAdvertising, etc)

If you wish to contribute a work to a community, then Copyleft or
ShareAlike is your best choice. If you want to make money on your
work, then you want NonCommercial-NoDerives. In either case, you
want to maximize your distribution, so I see no point in limiting
it in any way.