Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Friday, November 26, 2004, at 03:36PM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> 
wrote:

>It would be an interesting edge-of-the-envelope case
>if someone distributed a work CC-SA, but the only way
>to use that work was through the purchase of their
>software package for $199.
>
>If Poser handed out 3-D models for CGI stuff, but they
>were all in the Poser format or something.
>
>I suppose it would simply push Blender to move to support
>that format or something.
>
>CC-SA intends for anyone to be able to sell a work for profit.
>I don't think distributing a work in a proprietary format
>so that only you can make money from it is really the spirit
>of that license.
>
>If that's what you want, be straight about it by using CC-SA-NC.
>
>Personally, I hate SA-NC, but better to be honest up front than
>to say "our stuff is CC-SA" but then have it in a format that
>requires the purchase of your software to use it.

Without the conceptual framework of FSF-style-"Freedom", and without 
ASCII-style ubiquitous formats for media, how does one decide when work is 
accessible enough? OpenOffice didn't run on the Mac for ages (it's still 
barely usable), if work was released in OOO format it would be as inacessible 
as Word format to some people. With "Freedom", OOO formatted work better than 
Word on principle, but without it, it's just another format that some people 
couldn't read. 

If I want the source to a Beastie Boys track, I'll need to buy Logic. I don't 
know of an open multitrack sample sequencing format. 3D formats are terribly 
incompatible, so even if Blender is Free, so are Ayam and others, all of 
which have incompatible formats, limiting Freedom.  Even 2D vector formats 
aren't universal. I distribute my work in three different formats, for 
example.

Notable exceptions aside, professionals don't tend to use Free tools, yet. So 
using more popular but less flexible formats to give end-users easier acces 
will limit professional access to the source material. This is the opposite 
of Free Software, where keeping the sources simple is good for developers who 
can then make more complex forms (binaries) for end-users.

And if I have an oil painting, how do I ensure that's in an editable format? 
;-)

- Rob.