Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Friday, December 03, 2004, at 02:15PM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> 
wrote:

>
>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.

Remember that you can't copyright an idea. ;-) Let's say Alice has described 
some characters, equipment or rules for a game.

>From CC-SA:

"You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that alter or restrict the 
terms of this License or the recipients' exercise of the rights granted 
hereunder."

and

" You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly 
digitally perform the Derivative Work with any technological measures that 
control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of 
this License Agreement."

Let's say Alice publishes her gaming material in ASCII (or PDF, HTML, LaTEX, 
something many people can read). 

If Pete changes the format to his proprietary format that only his software 
can read, then Pete is imposing a new requirement, technologically, to 
control access and break the spirit of the license. The requirement is that 
you buy his technology that controls access to the derived work.

This is a triple no-no. He's introducing new terms ("buy my software"), and 
limiting your ability to excercise the rights granted to you under the 
original license, breaking the first requirement I quoted. And he's 
introducing technological measures (a proprietary format, rather than eg 
XML), breaking the second requirement.

I appreciate the network effects argument you give; it's a good one, but Pete 
won't buy it as he's just interested in making money "properly" without any 
of this giving-everything-away-for-free nonsense.

- Rob.