Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Ricardo Gladwell <president AT freeroleplay.org>]

Greg London 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.

Thanks

> 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.

I'm not sure I understand your example. Surely, ShareAlike-Sam (great 
names :) has to do all that work to get where he wants regardless of 
whether Pete creates his proprietary version of the software or not? 
Sure, Pete is giving Sam the idea, but then you can't copyright ideas so 
he's not giving Sam anything meaningful.

> 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.

One could similarly argue that, by getting rid of ShareAlike altogether, 
one increases the incentive to create content because everyone will have 
to reverse engineer everything which will increase creative output overall.

> 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.

I would accept that there aren't open formats for every media type which 
is why I suggested we make a Transparency Clause optional so that a CCPL 
user could select it for a work published in a media-type that has open 
formats if he/she so wished.

> 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.

Most digital software these days does have open source equivalents. With 
the advent of XML, the Internet, and popularisation of open standards 
there is a wealth of open formats out there, where once there were only 
a few, closed, proprietary formats.

> 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.

I appreciate that you dislike the Transparency option, but how do you 
feel about a "source" requirement: that a modifiable version of the 
content always be provided? So, for example, you cannot distribute a PDF 
without  providing the "source" document, i.e. the word processor or 
PageMaker file you used to generate the PDF? Note, this source 
requirement makes no mention of open or closed formats.

Kind regards...

--
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
president AT freeroleplay.org