Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 25 Nov 2004, at 15:12, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:

> "You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or 
> publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures 
> that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with 
> the terms of this License Agreement."
>
> I'm interested in what types of "technological measures" this covers. 
> For example, would it be illegal to distribute the work in a 
> proprietary format that would, for example, require expensive software 
> to edit?

Possibly. There certainly isn't a GPL-style requirement in the licenses 
that the work be in a common format. But it would certainly be against 
the spirit of the license to just give out Word documents.

It would break the terms of the license to add DRM to the work. No 
DriveThruRPG for CC'd work. :-)

> Does the CCPL itself in anyway require a modifiable version be made 
> available, similar to the source code clause in the GPL?

It's implicit in the non-ND licenses that you are able to copy, remix 
and sample the work. But you do not have to be able to re-make or 
re-arrange the work. This isn't really strong enough to satisfy the 
spirit of the Four Freedoms even if one could argue over whether it 
satisfies their letter.

This probably matters more for time-based media than for RPGs, though. 
For RPGs you can always OCR or copy&paste the text.

A PS (Provide Sources / Plus Score) module for CC-2.0 might be a good 
idea.

- Rob.