Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>]

>>>>> "s" == support  <support AT goldbytes.com> writes:

    s> I'm just concerned that as we see demand for 'controlling'
    s> these variations (ala Share Alike, Sampling, Translations, etc)
    s> in the licenses issued by CC that it will just spiral out of
    s> control with dozens of different licenses and be no more useful
    s> than current All Rights Reserved.

I think that it's a matter of degrees. From the creator's point of
view, the CC model of free distribution + some restrictions requires
significantly less enforcement and policing than full control and
required permissions.

Your point is pretty valid, though: there is still some policing that
has to go on. So far, projects I work with haven't had a big problem
getting compliance out of people (no lawyers needed yet), but we have
a pretty liberal license (by-sa).

It's probably a fair statement that the need to police license
compliance goes up linearly with the amount of restrictions you put in
the license. Creative Commons does have some licenses that have very
few restrictions, such as the Attribution license, as well of course
as the public domain dedication. There are options, therefore, for
creators to limit their policing responsibility to practically
nothing.

Experience with Open Source software seems to show that non-compliance
is a relatively rare problem. This may be due to the marginal status
of Open Source software, or just to the ease of compliance. It will
probably be the case with Open Content, too.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
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