Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Ricardo Gladwell said:
> I would both like to prevent downstream and upstream users from putting
> work into a proprietary format, specifically because it prohibits re-use
> by requiring down-stream users purchase expensive software, among other
> reasons.

It's an understandable concern.

But I think CC-SA has a safety valve for some of this.
Say Alice comes up with a roleplaying idea and licenses it CC-SA.
Proprietary Pete decides to implement Alice's game idea
into his proprietary software. The implementation is CC-SA,
but it is saved in Pete's proprietary format.

Cheap Charlie would like to use Pete's implementation without
paying Pete the $199 for Pete's proprietary software.

Pete's incentive is to get people to buy/use his software.
So, requiring an open format simply means that Pete won't
bother to create his implementation in the first place.

If you DO license it to require an open format, the idea
is that someone like ShareAlike-Sam will come along and
create open software that does the same thing as
Proprietary Pete's Program does, but under a open license.

But Sam doesn't get his incentive to create a share-alike
version simply because the license requires an open, sharealike
format. He does it because he wants to contribute. And Sam
could just as easily find incentive to create his program
because he see's what Pete's software does and Sam decides
that he wants to create a share alike version of that program
and contribute it to people under an open license.

For software and for documentation, it makes sense to require
an open format because the way they are used is basically
a text format or a word processor format, and that's about it.
And since there are plenty of open programs that support
text and word processing, no harm in requiring an open format.

Once you start to get into other media, though, the setup changes.
Not every program has an open source equivalent, yet.
Allowing Pete to implement Alice's work into a format that requires
the purchase of his proprietary program will only amplify the
incentive for someone to create an open source version of
Pete's program.

software patents will be a restriction, and any sort of encryption
will invoke DMCA protectionism, and perhaps these specific restrictions
should be prohibited in a sharealike license. ShareAlike-Sam can't
code an open version of Pete's program if Pete got a patent or
used encryption.

But specifically forbidding the use of a file format from a
proprietary program seems like overkill. If nothing else, it
might create incentive for someone to create an open version
of that same program.