Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Our difference in opinion hinges at the point where the
METAPHOR for a commons pasture or commons ocean FAILS
to follow a "commons" of intellectual works.

A physical commons (pasture, ocean, etc) is a zero sum game.
Every barbwire fence and every drift net must take something
from teh community to give something to the proprietary individual.

This is simply not the case with copyright works.

A public domain piece of software can have an infinite number
of proprietary forks created, and none of those forks prevents
a public-domain-friendly group of individuals from adding
that same functionality to the public domain software and
re-dedicating it to the public domain.

It IS the case with Patentable works. If you take some Public
Domain software and add some patented LZW compression function
to it, then no one can add that same functionality and make
it public domain.

PATENTS treat functionality as a zero-sum-game.
COPYRIGHT does not.

---

A copyright fork does not exploit, or set out the drift nets,
or whatever ugly metaphor you wish to use.

It is true that a copyright fork does not return anything
to the public domain. But neither does it take anything away
from it either.

A copyright fork does not TAKE ANYTHING AWAY from the public.
It creates something new that isn't public domain.

There is a huge difference between the two, and it is
the source of the fundamental difference in our opinions.

--

If someone has an "atomic" project, like a bunch of photographs
of a city, and they want to make them Public Domain, why not?

If wikitravel comes along and puts them into their project,
the project should be Copyleft/ShareAlike.

But how is wikitravel harmed if AAA uses the picture
in their own travel brochure?

You seem to want to monopolize any and all gift-economies
so that only other gift-economies can use them.

I used a public domain of teh moon off of a NASA website
for the cover of my sci-fi book. The book is "All Rights Reserved".
Did anyone "lose" something because I didn't "give something back"?

The original photos fo the moon are still public domain.

My point being that proprietary copyright forks are not
a zero-sum-game. My proprietary fork of the public-domain
image of the moon did not take anything away from anyone.

It added something that is proprietary, but it did not
take anything away from the public domain.

-- 
Hungry for a good read? Crave science fiction?
Get a taste of "Hunger Pangs" by Greg London.
http://www.greglondon.com/hunger/


--

Rob Myers said:
> On 21 Oct 2004, at 18:42, Greg London wrote:
>
>> The commons is like the shared pasture or shared ocean resources.
>
> Both concepts share the idea of responsible resource management &
> renewal. If I fence off an area of the commons, or deploy drift-nets,
> I'm denying resources to others. In the case of drift nets (or cutting
> down rainforest for ranches), I'm eventually denying resources *to
> myself*. So it is with PD'ing something.
>
>> 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.
>
> Your writing has been pivotal in my understanding of these issues but I
> don't think you're capturing the dynamic here. Most PD dedications or
> arrivals are finished, atomic works, not Wikis (or whatever). They will
> not be displaced by "proprietary" competition (or if they will, this is
> just competition). But if they are used in a "proprietary" work without
> return, the drift nets are out.
>
>> 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.
>
> This can easily describe movies, novels, records, paintings, a chemical
> formula, a graphic design, all things that it's easy to imagine being
> exploited without return if they are placed in the Public Domain.
>
>> 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.
>
> The average cultural work is unlikely to generate a patent, and is easy
> to "complete" as it can be created prior to release. IMHO these are not
> useful criteria for analysis. But any project can make an exploiter
> more money than its creator and be used to limit the creation of future
> work.
>
> PD'ing something is ideological. CC'ing something is practical. All
> CC'd work will end up in the Public Domain eventually. If it doesn't
> then the case for the licenses will grow stronger with every copyright
> term extension. :-)
>
> - Rob.
>
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