Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> Supposing CC did provide representation and disclaimer services. The FSF ask
> contributors to assign copyright to them so that they can defend the work
> under the GPL as its "author". People could assign copyright to CC for 
> similar
> reasons: if they use CC-SA they haven't lost much (they can use the work 
> like
> everyone else, although they can't offer closed licensing terms to third
> parties).

I've got no statistics on how many works are licensed SA, etc.
But the way CC presents the licenses in its cartoon FAQ,
the emphasis seems to be on the FreeAdvertising model.
Use NC to get your photo distributed, then when someone
notices and wants to use it commercially, charge them money.

So, I think assigning copyright to CC would be a no-go.

Also, the FSF only asks people to do that for their projects,
projects that they started or that people contributed to their
efforts. I think emacs and the gnu-c-compiler are both FSF.
And these were both started by Richard Stallman, and RS started
the FSF, so it was a bit of an inside job of sorts.

I have no idea how CC or FSF make money though. contributions?
Volunteers? How many people are on their payroll?

> A well as charging for registration services, CC could make money from
> sponsorship and selling physical media like the FSF and the internet movie
> archive. Add insurance services for those not willing to represent and legal
> services for those wanting to set up large-scale projects.

My perl book is GNU-FDL. And I just recently discovered
http://www.lulu.com
(started by one of the RedHat founders, by the way)
that does self-publishing via print-on-demand with
ZERO money up front. So I printed my perl book
through them as well. They sell it for $10 and I get $2.
The only reason this works for me is because I could
do it with zero money up front. I did it as a convenient
way for people to get a paperback without it costing
me anything. I didn't do it to get rich. They charge
$10 for a book and I make $2 per book. But if lulu
had charged even a token amount up front, it would not
have made sense for me to put a libre document into POD.

If CC charged for registration or for using their licenses,
they would have an opportunity to make money,
but they would also shut out anyone who intends on
contributing to a gift economy.

Lulu seems to be an attempt to fill the niche of making
money off selling physical media (primarily books, but others),
and with an approach where the author never has to pay any
money (they just  take a percentage of any sales) this fits
well with Gift Economy and FreeAdvertising models.

Greg

P.S. Buy my book, I could use the $2.

;)

-- 
"Impatient Perl" => Perl geek in about a week.
http://www.greglondon.com/iperl/index.html
Available in GNU-FDL, HTML, PDF, and paperback.