Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> Greg London  wrote:
>>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.
>
> Not immediately. The community will immediately get more wool or fish from 
> the
> producer who invests in the wire or the net. There may well be an immediate
> benefit to society. But over time the capability to create new or future
> wealth will suffer.

The commons pasture and commons ocean is immediate.
If your cows eat common grass, you've taken it away from anyone grazing it.
If you pull up a net full of fish, you've taken it away from anyone else
eating them.

>>This is simply not the case with copyright works.
>
> IMHO it is exactly the case with copyrighted works *if* one looks downstream
> from the immediate benefit.

Downstream, a physical commons can work if it has the ability to
replenish itself over time. The grass your cows ate can grow back.
The fish you took out can be replaced by the remaining stock.
This assumes the commons is managed in some way to avoid the
'tragedy of the commons'. But it is another way that the metaphor
for a common pasture diverges from applying to a commons of intellectual
property.

You're not talking about the potential of the intellectual commons
to replenish itself, because Public Domain will continue to grow as
copyrights expire. "fish" are restocked as copyright terms expire,
and the Public Domain gets new content.

What you're talking about when you say "downstream" is really
about keeping Proprietary competiton out of the field,
so that a Gift Economy can monopolize the pasture.

Public Domain is NOT a gift economy, it is a true commons
on which anyone can feed, whether they be the most altruistic
seeker of knowledge or the most underhanded Ebeneezer Scrooge.

The downstream potential you speak of is really saying
"don't put your works in the public domain so anyone can
use them, put them under a copyleft license so only
other Gift-Economies can use them"

Copyleft is NOT a commons.

> I'm just going to quickly nip out and add the bits of Disney's "Aladdin" 
> that
> aren't in the (modern) 1001 Nights to an equivalent public domain work. Wish
> me luck. ;-)

You conveniently ignore the many versions of Hamlet that all
exist under AllRightsReserved without suffering the public domain.
Just because MelGibson was in a version of Hamlet, doesn't mean
Hamlet has been taken out of the public domain.

> the current IP ideology is doing its darndest
> to make it zero sum.

Do you realize that's also how you are relating to it?
"Don't put it in the public domain, or we might LOSE something."

>>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"?
>
> Yes. They lost a sci-fi book. ;-)

The Public Domain never HAD my sci-fi book in the first place,
so the public domain couldn't have LOST anything.

You put a smiley face after your comment, but your comment
fairly represents your attitude. You relate to the Public Domain
as a zero-sum-game. no one lost anything.

> Could you have afforded to pay a professional illustrator for an original
> illustratuion for the cover? In fact, could you have afforded to commission
> the image you have used? You have added value to something from the Public
> Domain. If that image had not been placed in the Public Domain, your product
> would not have had that value.

You speak of value as if I stole something.

And why is paying a professional illustrator for an original
somehow better than me doing the work myself and trying to get
paid for the work I did?

> I am not talking about fairness or Left/Right ideology, I am talking about
> growing *total* value at the fastest possible rate.

Then you grossly underestimate just how much growth is possible
by securing to authors and inventors for a limited time
exclusive rights to their writings and inventions
so that they can make money on their work.

The rights given to authors/inventors and the duration that
they are exclusive should be balanced such that good writings
and good inventions can make the author/inventor enough profit
to justify the work they put into it.

And I would say that certain things have tilted the balance
too much in the author/inventor's favor. Software patents
are far too powerful. And the anti-circumvention clauses of the
DMCA have been used to monopolize what would otherwise be
public domain devices and prevent market competition.

But the basic idea of giving authors/inventors some exclusive
rights to their works is the most brilliant, cost effective
way of encouraging the development of the arts and sciences
that I've seen. It is government funding for the arts and
sciences without costing the government any money.

The advent of computers and the internet now make some
writing/inventing processes possible that could not have
happened before. effectively free copy/distribution and
low cost modification (cost of labor) means that massive
software projects can now be done by willing volunteers,
instead of requiring paid employees.

But just because gift economies are now possible on a
massive scale does not mean that market economies are
obsolete. Nor does it mean that the ways and means that
market economies operate around writings and inventions
are suddenly evil.

What it means is that Market-Economies now operate alongside
Gift-Economies. And both of them feed off the Public Domain,
and eventually replenish the Public Domain.

And it would be wise of those who wish to contribute
to gift economies to understand what they need to do
to survive alongside market economies.

But all this talk of "taking" from the public domain
when someone creates a new, derived work and puts
"all rights reserved" on it, that doesn't fly.

---

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