Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> " 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.


I can see how "technological measures" would disallow stuff
like DRM and encryption (and may a patent?), but I don't
think it is a file format qualifies as
"a technological measures that control access or use of the Work"
just because no other program can read it.

Pete isn't preventing anyone from reading the file.
It isn't DRM.  It's just that no one cared about Pete's program
enough to add Pete's format to their own software.

To put it another way: Obscurity is not a "control measure".

You can't penalize someone and prohibit the use of a file format
simply because it isn't popular.