Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Evan Prodromou said:
> 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.

well, Linux isn't marginal. so I think it has more to do with
the ease of compliance part. OSI's definition for open source
really pushed the license requirements to be extremely, well, open.

The Open Source licenses boil down to PublicDomain-Style licenses (BSD)
and Copyleft licenses, which, on the compliance scale of things,
is a lot more easy than Non-Commercial, No-Derivatives, Edu-Only.

I think it also is a reflection of Open Source intent,
which is that "software wants to be free". I think
most Open Source programmers don't really care what
people do with the work as long as the work remains,
for the most part, free.

some Creative Commons licenses are of a different intent,
namely generating Free Advertising for the author.
In this case, the author cares if people do something
with the work that affects their bottom line.

And I know some people take issue wth my term
"Free Advertising", but it isn't necessarily a
bad thing, it just reflects that the author is
operating in a market economy, not a gift
economy.

Personally, my perl book is GNU-FDL because
I wanted to be able to accept contributions
from other people and not have to worry about
disclaimers and still be able to sell copies
of the book.

If I licensed it CC-NC to gain a monopoly on
selling the work, I would have to get disclaimers
from everyone who contributes fixes or patches
to the book, saying they disclaim all copyrights
to thier contributions to me. Without a copyright
disclaimer, any contributer becomes an author,
and then selling a copy fo a book licensed CC-NC
starts to get messy.

If there are any "compliance" issues around
CC-NC works, my guess is that at some point
a case will come up where the original author
mistakenly used CC-NC on a collaborative work,
accepted contributions from other people,
and attempted to retain a monopoly on the
commercial rights to the collaborative work.

I don't think Creative Commons has anything
that clarifies this on any of their
comic strips explaining their licenses.
So my guess is someone at some point will
pick their wrong license for their project,
and there's going to be compliance trouble.

Greg
-- 
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"Impatient Perl" takes you from
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