Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

James Grimmelmann said:
> 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.

The thing that sucks about the internet is
the second you're lazy, someone tells you.  ;)
OK, so I did the research I should have done
on the last email.

CTEA was passed in Oct 1998.
The original complaint (Eldred v Ashcroft)
was filed on January 11, 1999.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft )
CC was founded 2001.
First cc-licenses issued dec 2002
Supreme court ruled on Eldred v Ashcroft on January 15, 2003,

So, the ruling against Eldred v. Ashcroft wasn't
the cause, but the CTEA seems to have been a prime motivator.

>>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.

Yes. Agreed. But "balanced copyright" will always result
in a Market Economy, not a Gift Economy, which supports
my point that CC is not so much interested in Gift Economy
licenses like GPL or BSD.

A gift economy is the "anti-copyright", in that instead
of securing rights to the author so they can make money,
it gives most of the rights back to the public.

The only rights a gift economy needs to retain are the
ones that allow it to survive along side market pressures
that would want to take the work private.
Which is my point here:

http://www.greglondon.com/dtgd/html/draftingthegiftdomain.html#8_3_Copyleft_and_Public_Domain_versus_Competition

This game-theory chart is specific to Gift Economies only.

Creative Commons has focused on the
NonCommercial licenses as an approach to
find a new balance point that allows
authors to make money, but doesn't
send the DRM or DMCA or CTEA cops after
the public.

It's a market economy license.

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