Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

On Thu, 2004-28-10 at 13:20 -0500, J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote:
> Rob Myers wrote:
> > BY has the useful side-effect of being able to find the original work, which
> > offsets the lack of a requirement to provide source.
>
> I think that goes too far.  The attribution could include invalid contact
> information (perhaps the person moved or died, perhaps the business went under
> or was bought out) or the contact person/organization becomes uncooperative.

Agreed. As the fine book Free Culture describes almost ad nauseum, requirements to contact the original copyright holder can be really, really nasty. They may work for the next six months, but over time people die, move, disappear, quit jobs, and otherwise become difficult to locate. Rights to works get transferred or sold. Given that copyrights don't expire for many, many decades at this point (at least in the USA), these things get harder and harder to deal with.

Of course, the Internet Generation is too stupid to realize this. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we seem to think that email addresses are permanent, that URIs stay resolvable forever, and that it's a very simple matter to google someone and ask their permission for X, Y, or Z. But the fact is that to be useful works should really be self-contained, including all source and all license information. It makes life in 5, 10, or 50 years much easier (and actually, probably in 6 months...).

So, yeah, "offsets" might be a strong term.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan AT bad.dynu.ca                OOO