Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Yes, there is overhead in gift economy licenses,
but the vast majority of that overhead is required
to protect a Writing inside of a fragile gift economy
while a money-driven market economy churns alongside it.

Copyleft is overhead. Rather than simply putting the work
in the Public Domain, the author decides to place the work
under a Copyleft license so that the work can SURVIVE,
without this protection any long-term gift economy project
is at risk of being subsumed, privatized, and extended
by proprietary competition. Copyleft is a boatload of overhead,
but it is NEEDED if you want a GIFT ECONOMY to survive.
The overhead of Copyleft is counter balanced by the
benefit it provides to the project: survival.

Attribution, on the other hand, is overhead that is not
required for a gift-economy ot survive, and so, the overhead
works against a gift-economy project with no counter-balancing
BENEFIT. Attribution may encourage people to contribute to a
project, but it is in a weird, market-economy sort of way.
"I'll contribute this code if all copies point back to my website".
That is not a gift, and therefore that is not a gift-economy.

Copyleft is scalable, even if everyone does it.
Attribution becomes unscalable if everyone starts adding URL's
to their contributions, etc.

Public Domain is the only approach that has absolutely no overhead.

I'm saying there is a difference in the overhead that comes
from a Copyleft license versus the overhead that comes from
requiring Attribution. One is required for a gift-economy
to exist, one is not. One scales as more and more users contribute
to a gift economy, and one does not.

You're arguing about the magnitude of the vector
("very light requirements")

I'm arguing about the direction.







Evan Prodromou said:
> On Fri, 2004-29-10 at 11:43 -0400, Greg London wrote:
>
>> A gift is given freely and has no strings that attach it to the giver.
>> Cumulative advertising clauses or cumulative attributions could weigh down
>> on a gift-economy project enough to kill it.
>
> I don't know of a license that has fewer requirements than Attribution.
> The only no-strings-attached provision is a Public Domain dedication.
>
> I think a very healthy gift economy in Free Software has grown up with
> very light requirements (attribution, license notification, copyleft,
> disclaimer of warranty) on most Free licenses. I'd find it hard to
> defend the position that these licenses' requirements have made Free
> Software untenable.
>
> ~ESP
>
> --
> Evan Prodromou                  .O.
> http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
> evan AT bad.dynu.ca                OOO
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