Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

The question is whether or not "many" CC licenses is an issue or not.

the main argument is that "many" licenses creates incompatibility
problems, or at the very least, questions of how to combine works
of different licenses such that all license requirements are still met.

This is a problem only if the original work is intended to become
derived many, many times beyond the original. I don't think this
is the Creative Commons model. CC's "niche" is to offer Market-Economy
licenses that are more liberal that "All Rights Reserved", that leverage
some of its liberal rules in an attempt to offer free-distribution and
free-samples and free-word-of-mouth about some really cool work that
might not otherwise get noticed.

CC's "twist" on licensing is to offer NonCommercial with a bunch of options.

Artists and Authors can then offer their works under CC-NC with whatever
other acronym doublets they wish (NoDerives, BY, etc), in an effort to
leverage some of their rights in exchange for free advertising.

The author maintains enough rights that downstream authors are not
as "enabled" or "empowered" as the original author is. The original
author can make money. downstream authors cannot. Therefore, a major
incentive to develop, derive, and improve a work is taken away. And
therefore, the number of great-great-grandchildren of a CC-NC document
are greatly reduced, if they are ever born at all.

Since the Derivatives of a CC-NC document "peter out", incompatibility
issues are not a real issue. The issues never accumulate to the point
where some massive, multi-author, multi-generational, work would ever
get THIS >< close to being created, if it weren't for those pesky
alphabet-soup incompatibility problems.

Gift Economy licenses are of the kind that require the author to give
up enough rights that the work can effectively live FOREVER, with
unlimited DESCENDENTS, and never accumulate so much legal overhead
as to suffocate the work.

The BSD advertising clause showed people in the open-source community
how such "overhead" can accumulate to the point where it becomes
almost as much work to derive a work with advertising clauses as it
does to create a new work from scratch with no advertising restrictions.

Once you get so much overhead that you're doing more work to meet the
licensing requirements than you are adding to the real "value" of the
work, the work effectively exits any gift-economy and exists only
in the author's domain.

Yes, for gift economy licenses, incompatibility is a killer.
but as soon as you slap NonCommercial on a work, you are no
longer talking about a gift-economy license. you are talking
about a market economy license. and at that point, you're only
arguing to what degree of incompatibility will you allow, you're
really asking the question "How many derivations should be possible
before overhead becomes too much?"

If you want an infinite number of derivations and an infinite
number of documents to be mixed together, you MUST choose a
gift-economy license. GNU-FDL with no invariant sections and
no front/back cover texts is one example. The author effectively
gives up enough rights to the work that the WORLD is empowered
to take on the work and own it as their own if they wish.







James Grimmelmann said:
> At 01:52 PM 8/15/2004, toddd AT mypse.goracer.de wrote:
>> >
>> > There are big advantages to making all licenses BY and then allowing
>> > authors to waive their attribution rights.  First, it means fewer
>> licenses,
>> > so that the complexity of choosing one is reduced.
>>
>>So why do you have so many licenses at all?
>>by-nc-nd and by-nc-sa would be enough. People could just waive whatever they
>>don't want. Just 2 licenses, doesn't that sound good?
>
> There are also, exactly as you suggest, advantages to having many different
> licenses.  Picking the actual number and set to offer is a balancing