Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Tuesday, November 30, 2004, at 09:51AM, Ricardo Gladwell 
<president AT freeroleplay.org> wrote:

>However, as I have argued before, by publishing content in closed, 
>proprietary formats you can also restrict the free flow of ideas. In the 
>case of Brand X proprietary word processor, whilst it may be legal to 
>only publish content in this format under the CCPL, the format itself 
>may not be open and thus it may be difficult if not impossible to use 
>the content unless you pay a large ammount of money for the application.

This is true, however there are two sides to this.

If I release an image in, say, Photoshop format, I am limiting my audience.
If, however, I convert the image to a non-proprietary format, I will lose 
some of the editability of the work. Which is more important, breadth of 
access or depth of access? (Hmmm. This parallels some current governmental 
debates on the arts here in the UK :-) ).

In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made 
about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I 
couldn't have done the work any other way at that time, I can't convert the 
work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the 
all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector 
image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full 
editability of the 3D version. I'm about to make some more of this work in 
Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one 
takes FSF-style Freedom as  aguiding principle, I shouldn't even be using 
Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until 
Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can't even render (full-strength 
masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those 
features.

In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A 
producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the 
software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various 
formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the 
original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements 
would become a consideration.

I'm not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are 
vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some 
things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.

- Rob.