Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Andrea Glorioso said:
>
>     > Surely PD qualifies as libre?
>     > <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain>.
>
> I'm not   particularly fond of Public Domain   and I  personally don't
> think that it really guarantees the freedoms of the system as a whole.

Copyleft is Libre, and it witholds enough rights
such that a project cannot be preempted by a
Proprietary version.

PublicDomain is Libre, and it allows someone to
take the Public work private and compete with
the Public version of the work.

If the goal is to create a self-sustaining
gift economy that exists over a long period
of time, then Copyleft is probably desirable.

Most music/photo/video/documentation projects
that are Libre are, SO FAR, short enough in
scope that they don't have to worry about
Proprietary competition killing the gift economy.

you write a song, play all the tracks, mix it,
record it, and give it away.  By the time you
give it away, you're done with that song.
and the Gift Economy no longer needs to exist
for that song to survive. so proprietary
competition is not an issue. Any desire to control
the song after that point becomes a function
of Ego rather than Community.

If you want to create a full length, CGI film,
with a script, CGI models for props and actors,
music for the soundtrack, etc, etc, then you'll
probably want Copyleft, so that as you are
in the process of developing all the pieces,
someone doesn't come along, take your work,
make a proprietary version, hire people to
finish it, and then sell it for money.

The problem is that this kind of proprietary
competition kills the project before it actually
finishes. in that kind of situation, Copyleft
is the only way for the Gift Economy to survive
in a world of Market Competition so that the
project can actually be completed.

If you're doing a one-off, then Public Domain
is fine. If the creative work is going to
evolve or develop over time, Copyleft will
allow the project to survive beside Market Competition.

> However, I have to study the whole thing in more detail.

I wrote about the comparison between
Public Domain and Copyleft here:

http://www.greglondon.com/dtgd/html/draftingthegiftdomain.html#8_Copyleft_or_Public_Domain_