Development of Creative Commons licenses

[James Grimmelmann <james.grimmelmann AT yale.edu>]

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.