Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> On 21 Oct 2004, at 18:01, Sigmascape1 AT cs.com wrote:
>
>> Dedicating content to the public domain is critical to the success of
>> the open content movement.
>
> IMHO quite the opposite: every dedication to the Public Domain
> undermines the Open Content movement. PD work can be used without
> giving anything back. It will not grow the commons. I can easily see
> companies pushing PD and PD-alike licenses to allow them to take
> people's work: see the sudden liking that Microsoft/AdTI found for the
> BSD license when faced with the success of the GPL.

Well, there's some loose use of language there.

> It will not grow the commons.

The "commons" is a Public Domain concept, so every PD dedication
will grow the commons.  CreativeCommons is not the same as THE "commons".
The commons is like the shared pasture or shared ocean resources.

>every dedication to the Public Domain undermines the Open Content movement

Well, not "every" dedication. I think it is simply a function of
whether or not the project can finish or whether it is surpassed
by proprietary competition that uses the Public Domain work against
the very project that created it.

A project that has a fixed goal, does not require a lot of maintenance,
and does not require a lot of long-term collaboration, could probably
dedicate its finished product ot the Public Domain without problem.

There are two different conditions where a public domain dedication
may be problematic.

(1) if the project is long-running or simply does not have a
clear "when we get to this point, we're finished" goal, putting the
work-in-progress into the public domain would allow proprietary
competition to consume and extend and possibly extinguish the
original public-domain project. The linux operating system,
and all the applications that generally go with a computer,
would be well advised to avoid the Public Domain ot prevent
Microsoft from using PD code to compete against a PD project.
Wikipedia is an ever-growing project and needs share-alike
or similar copyleft mechanisms to protect it in the long-term.

(2) if the project could be adapted and extended to include
a patent of any kind, then the Public Domain version of that
project can never replicate that same functionality.
As long as it remains in the realm of copyright, a Public Domain
project conceivably could compete against a proprietary
competitor, it would just take man-hours to do it. Once the
proprietary competitor introduces a software patent, the
Public Domain project is permanently locked out of ever
implementing that functionality by law.

I discuss this in detail here:

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

But if neither of these two points apply, then PD should be fine.

If a project can successfully complete and has no danger
of having patent restrictions applied, I see no reason
to exclude proprietary interests from using the results
of that project on principles alone.

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