Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

>Rob Myers said:
>> Greg London wrote:
> Then with copyright term extensions we are seeing the metaphor at work.

no. that's a function of a government that can be easily
influenced by a lot of money.  My book "Hunger Pangs" is
about corporate influence of the democratic process.
We need serious campaign finance reform to fix it.
But the underlying notion of letting authors and inventors
get exclusive rights to their work long enough to make
some money off of it is still good. What has been lost in
the picture is that if a company can't make enough money
off of their movie in 90 years, then it wasn't that good
of a movie. When it goes from being a system to encourage
new development of writings and ideas to being a system
of corporate welfare and turning century old cartoons into
cash cows, then the system has been pushed too
far in one direction. But its a flaw of the way our democratic
system can be influenced, it isn't a flaw in the system
of copyright or patent law.

>>Copyleft is NOT a commons.
>
> It is a shared, managed resource for the benefit of the communmity.

where "community" is defined as those who wish to contribute to a
Gift-Economy.

A commons benefits the WHOLE community, even those who wish to feed
off of it and create proprietary forks.

You are using loose language to consistently redefine
copyleft as a commons when it isn't one.

>>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.
>
> Nor does it mean that Mel Gibson's version has been placed into the Public
> Domain.

SO WHAT?

William Shakespeare's work is public domain.
He had his chance to make some money off it and now it's PD.
Mel Gibson and company invest a lot of WORK into creating their
version of Hamlet. How does that WORK take anything from the public domain?
And how do you get off demanding that they DONATE their work to the
public domain or to a copyleft system?

The entire point behind copyright/patent law is that people invest
their own WORK to create something that didn't exist before,
they tehn get a period of time to attempt to recoup some money
to pay for their WORK, and then the writing/invention goes into
the PublicDomain.

>>The Public Domain never HAD my sci-fi book in the first place,
>>so the public domain couldn't have LOST anything.
>
> Whilst you can't lose what you don't have, you also don't have what you 
> don't
> have. When standing on the shoulders of giants, why deny others a leg-up?

I put work into creating my book.
I'm using copyright as a means to get paid for that work.
Doing this does not suck the blood out of the shoulders
of giants because either the giants had their own copyright
term (and their own chance to make money off their labor)
or they donated their work under some non-copyleft license.

> There's an imbalance between your denying an illustrator
> work by using the PD and yet using copyright to protect your work.

When the copyright on my book expires, and someone uses
MY book to create a proprietary fork, I've already had
a full copyright term to recoup my labor. There is no
imbalance there. I get paid for my work from my copyright
term. after that, someone can create a proprietary fork
based off my book and they can get paid off of that copyright
term.

There is no exploitation of labor in this system.

There IS an imbalance in the powers and duration of rights
given to authors/inventors lately but that doesn't mean there
is an imbalance in the system of copyright/patents as it
was meant to operate.

If anyone is getting exploited, it is not the giants
on whose shoulders new works stand, it is the consumer
public who has to buy the works from a monopoly that
has become overly powerful and lasts too long.