Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Brian Clark said:
>> Greg London said:
>>Intellectual ideas are naturally PUBLIC PROPERTY.
>
> Greg, that's such a strawman argument. "Since it is really protected in the
> Constitution, it's not a 'natural right'" seems short-sighted. After all,
> one might make the argument that freedom of religion or a woman's right to
> vote aren't "natural rights" either -- since it takes a legal structure like
> the US Constitution to give them force.

that could be interpreted as an implied "slippery slope"
argument. if copyright is not a natural right, then
neither is freedom of religion or women's right to vote.
therefore, copyright must be a natural right or we will
lose the freedom of religion.

however, section 8 is a laundry list of what
Congress CAN do, mostly relating to
"regulating congress" and conducting the business
of government.

Every "Right" is worded in ammendments as something
that Congress can NOT do.

Nowhere does the constitution or ammendments say
"congress shall make no law abridging the
rights of authors or inventors to their works".

>>intellectual entities are NOT naturally private property.
>
> That might be your personal opinion, but that's not the underlying
> principles of the Berne Convention:

The supreme court supported the idea that
copyright is not a natural right in
1834, Wheaton v. Peters,

http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html

> your argument assumes that "IP holders"
> are the enemy of the gift economy.

no. my point in "Drafting the Gift Domain"
is that IP holders can either place their
work in a Market Economy or a Gift Economy,
that both economies can exist side by side.

The only caveat being that some gift economy
projects need to protect themselves from
market competition by using Copyleft or
something similar.

and I don't believe I ever used such a emotionally
charged word as "enemy" when talking about
Market Economies, or "All Rights Reserved".
If I did, let me know so I can fix it.

> Some of us in the film community might be able to convince some of them that
> contributing it to the gift economy is a good thing: I doubt I would be as
> successful convincing them that they don't really own that film anyway, they
> just have a legal private monopoly for a limited time.

I never said authors don't own their works.

I simply said that it's not a natural right,
its a legally created concept, allowed by
the Constitution only to the extent that the
Public Good benefit by the progress it makes
in Science and useful Arts.

I have no qualms with authors owning their
work for a limited time and for limited rights.
The market economies created by IP holders
have gotten us great literature and great
scientific advances.

However, the misconcieved notion that IP is a
natural right, in my opinion, is what's feeding
the extensions of terms and rights to the point
where a perpetual monopoly of totalitarian rights
has been granted to Authors and Inventors.

You can fight the DMCA, the CTEA, and software
patents, but as long as poeple view IP as a
natural right, it will be an uphill battle.
And any "win" could easily be "lost" again
by future legislation.

to use an analogy, CTEA is a symptom of the
disease called "natural rights of authors".

You can either fight the symptoms,
or you can treat the disease.