Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Evan Prodromou said:
> On Mon, 2004-06-12 at 17:26 -0500, Greg London wrote:
>
>> Stories, movies, songs, don't segment nicely.
>> You need an author or a director running the show.
>> More contributers can make the result _worse_
>
> That's a crock. Even the smallest movie requires dozens of people to get
> it finished, and a major motion picture requires hundreds.

Yes and they all do fairly separate and distinct functions.
Lighting, sound, camera, screenplay.

100 people cannot split up the work to write a single novel.

Unless you want to argue that one person writes it, another
person edits it, another person does the cover art, someone
else does advertising, etc, etc, etc. but

100 _can_ split up the work to write a dictionary, or a
piece of software.

two people cannot have a baby in 4.5 months.

Some things do not scale with more people.

Adding engineers to a late project will only make it more late.

> When the perfect movie, book, image or musical piece gets published,
> it'll make sense to keep it from being improved. When everything that
> needs to be said has been said, then we won't need derivative works.
>
> Until then, Free Culture is the right idea.

If you want me to jump on the "FlOSS is the right idea for everything"
bandwagon, then you're wasting your time.

I'm on the "Spectrum of Rights" wagon, from Public Domain to
"All Rights Reserved" and everywhere in between. Each has a
use, and some are better at some things than others.

And that means "All Rights Reserved" is the best approach for
some things and "Public Domain" is the best approach for others,
and an airtight-copyleft-no-drm-no-patent-open-source license
is right for still other situations.

>> 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...
>
> Sigh.
>
>     http://www.wikinews.org/ <-- Daily news from Wikimedia
>     http://wikitravel.org/ <-- World-wide travel guide, by-sa
>
> You need to read more, Greg. There's a lot of interesting things out
> there under CC licenses. Big, hairy projects, like Sal's OpSound.

I'm familiar with wikitravel. I don't use it because I don't go anywhere.
I didn't say it didn't exist. cripes.

wikinews sounds great. I'm all for it. depending on how they manage
themselves, they got a shot at making it, and altering our Culture
for the better.

Oh, and here's the opening line for their webpage:
"Welcome to Wikinews, a free content news source. We started in November 2004"
so if you want to chastize me for not knowing about a website that started
a month ago, by all means, sigh away.