Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Branko Collin" <collin AT xs4all.nl>]

On 6 Dec 2004, at 17:26, 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_.
> 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.

Stories can gain in the telling too; a good story-teller can 
incorporate a lot of disparate, clunky bits and smooth over these 
rough patches, to end up with a better story.

I wrote comics, often in a group, and although, yes, it does help 
consistency, a lot, if one single person writes the final script, it 
does not mean a group cannot write comics. (For a small sample, see 
<http://coa.inducks.org/coa/c1/comp2.php?lg=0&default_o=1&code=H&creat
=Branko+Collin>. If you click the links, you will see the amount of 
authors per story.)

Although films need the single vision of a director, they also need 
the contributions of all the other people on the set. My freelancing 
handbook singles out the film making process as an example of how a 
group of individuals can create a corporation like superstructure for 
the duration of a single project. That too many cooks spoil the soup 
is shown by the anecdotes of 'the studio' or 'the producers' 
'ruining' a film. But how bad is that? So now we have n versions of 
Blade Runner; is society enriched by that, or damaged?

I am just pointing this out, because I am thinking about this sort of 
collaboration a lot, and trying to find answers myself... :-)

(As an aside, but related, my brother has just applied for a state 
grant to be able to develop collaborative software that will allow 
people to write songs, stories, et cetera together live and online. 
To avoid legal difficulties, use of a Creative Commons license will 
probably made mandatory, if this goes through.)

-- 
branko collin
collin AT xs4all.nl