Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> On 6 Dec 2004, at 19:57, Greg London wrote:
>> I just haven't seen a CC project that was big enough to require
>> source, prohibit patents, etc, etc, that are the sort of overly
>> restrictive license options needed for a big, massive, long-term
>> project to survive.
>
> I finally put my finger on what is wrong with this argument. We do have
> just such a project: it's called "culture". ;-)

Culture is not a Gift Economy project. Culture benefits
from "All Rights Reserved" works as much as GNU-GPL.
So if "culture" is the only project, then license selection
is to some extent arbitrary.

I'm talking about a project with a specific goal
that inspires people to contribute to it but its
such a big project that it will take hundreds of
people several years to do it. These kinds of projects
_need_ the sort of protections that come with
copyleft, source code, no DRM, no patents, no nothing.

Some guy sharing photos on his blog doesn't _need_ that.

One could argue that Culture benefits _from_ something
like Wikipedia being successful, getting to a point of
completion, and being maintained over time.

And in that sense, a project like Wikipedia needs
long-term protection to survive the catepillar to
butterfly transition, as well as the threats that
come with being a highly colorful piece of flying
protein.

But Culture itself is not the project that is controlled
by the license. Culture is the project controlled by
Copyright Laws, Patent Laws, court decisions, and
a slew of other variables. If you want to nuture culture,
fix the intellectual property laws that have gone all
out of whack.

But for a CC project that needs this sort of protetion,
I can't even think of what it might look like.
Maybe music and pictures and software and models could
come together in a way to make some kind of really
great movie or something. I don't know.

I haven't figured out if the medium itself simply doesn't
lend itself to large-scale barn-raisings, or if its
simply a lack of inspiration and licenses.

Operating systems and applications lend themselves well
to having the work being divied up among an army of
contributers. It's just easier to break the design up
that way, and once you've broken it up, you might as
well pass it around.

Wikipedia is similar. Anyone can contribute one piece of
a definition of one word. It segments naturally and
reassembles seamlessly.

Stories, movies, songs, don't segment nicely.
You need an author or a director running the show.
More contributers can make the result _worse_.
A movie segments with a lot of work, and reassembly
usually shows the splice marks. You can tell the
work of one director from another just by looking
at a single scene.

The only thing I can think of that could be CC-SA
and would be massive enough to be an inspiration
would be something like an online-news-website.
Sort of like wikipedia, but more the day-to-day stuff.
Would it inspire enough Edison Carter's to make a
news channel? dunno. could be interesting...