Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

I am not so sure about this in all areas - look at what caused "This Song" to 
be made. This can be especially dangerous where hugh amounts of copyrights 
are concentrated in the hands of a few entities.

On Thursday 21 October 2004 04:52 pm, Greg London wrote:
> 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.