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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: James Grimmelmann <james.grimmelmann AT yale.edu>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: The Beeb and CC
  • Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 12:41:58 -0700

At 10:50 AM 6/8/2004, Greg London wrote:

> Ben Francis <lists AT hippygeek.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>If CC are making a concious decision NOT to make the licenses DFSG-free
>>and have a good reason for doing so,

Wildly unsubstantiated conjecture follows:

I believe Creative Commons was started by Lessig and Eldred
after they lost the lawsuit against the government challenging
the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act
and losing. (Eldred v. Ashcroft)

CC was founded in 2001, and launched its licenses in December of 2002. The Supreme Court agreed to hear Eldred v. Ashcroft in February of 2002 and issued its decision in January of 2003. I don't think that this undermines your point.

Since they failed to affect the law in the courts,
they took the approach of affecting behaviour through
Creative Commons and its new licensing model.

They're both attempts at restoring balance to copyright. A third would be legislative: the Eric Eldred act and other attempts to get Congress to roll back the more destructive aspects of copyright. Larry Lessig has been giving presentations for a while now that emphasize the point that copyright law is now written so that it extends all sorts of exclusive protections to people who don't need or want them; Creative Commons is both an attempt to highlight the damage this maximalism does to freedom and creativity and an attempt to undo some of it by giving people the tools to disclaim unneeded parts.

James

Disclaimer: I may be a law student and a CC intern, but I'm neither a lawyer nor speaking on behalf of CC. These are just my personal takes on issues I think are interesting.





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