Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 28 Oct 2004, at 20:14, Evan Prodromou wrote:

>  Agreed. As the fine book Free Culture

I'm re-reading it at the moment. I read it so enthusiastically when I 
first got it that I've actually damaged the binding of a hardback. :-)

> 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.

That's not really what I was getting at with my comment on BY. It 
doesn't amtter who the rights go to or where people go. If you know who 
made the work, you can web search and find other work, or the original 
work in the case of derived work, by them. It's better than nothing, 
although not anywhere near as good as providing source (CC-PS?) so you 
can recreate the work.

>  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.

Hence my flabbergastedness at the DMCA takedown hack Lessig mentions in 
his UCL talk.

> 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...).

I agree absolutely, and so do the FSF. They recommend including the CC 
license with the work.

- Rob.