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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Scott Johnston <johnston AT vectaport.com>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: License that allows private copying?
  • Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 16:02:30 -0800

<x-tad-bigger>>>>>></x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger> "SJ" == Scott Johnston <</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger>johnston at vectaport.com</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger>> writes:
</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>
SJ> For this particular copyrighted work I would start with an
SJ> Attribution-Non-Commercial license. Then I would mix in a
SJ> Private clause if one existed. My test for whether the
SJ> copying was private would be whether I could get a copy (for
SJ> free or otherwise) by finding it on google.

"You may distribute this file however you want, as long as Licensor
can't find it on Google?" That seems pretty arbitrary to me; I mean,
I could just get around that with a robots.txt file.

</x-tad-bigger>

But can you keep others from putting up links to that copy without a robots.txt file? If you couldn't you would be in violation of this theoretical Private clause.

Yes, whether it is available on google is an arbitrary test, and not something to base a license on. I'm hoping there are other ways to (legally) distinguish between public and private.

<x-tad-bigger>Again, I want to ask: what's the point? If I give the work to 10
people, and those 10 people each give it to 10 people, and so on, it
gets out to millions of people the same as if I had made it publicly
available to those millions of people directly.
</x-tad-bigger>

So you are curious about what motivates me to inquire on this topic? I have a peer-to-peer content development tool that I want to sell over the internet. It is intended for use by a limited number of people during any one session. To encourage its adoption, I would require that only one person in a group of potential collaborators buy a copy. The rest of their potential group could try it out for free.
<x-tad-bigger>
</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>It seems like it just puts a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt on
the licensee's plate without providing any tangible benefit to the
licensor. I guess the best you get is disallowing people with no
friends to get the work, which if you hate lonely people might be some
kind of benefit.
</x-tad-bigger>

Actually my intent is to remove FUD (and earn customer gratitude), by clearly allowing (and encouraging) the kind of private sharing that will happen regardless (the kind of private sharing that is in my interest), without allowing the public sharing that would be self-defeating.

As for discriminating against lonely people, you are right. I'm making something for two or more people to use. Completely isolated people are out of luck :-)

Scott Johnston
<x-tad-bigger>
</x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-bigger>~ESP

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