Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-licenses - Re: Does CC-SA require a modifiable copy?

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Does CC-SA require a modifiable copy?
  • Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 22:58:54 +0000

On 7 Dec 2004, at 20:13, Greg London wrote:

How did we get from me saying this:
( https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2004-December/ 001412.html )
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.

to you arguing this situation:
Evan Prodromou said:
Consider: Alice makes Free Software, releases it, and forgets about it.
Two years later, Bob finds it on a FTP server, likes it, modifies it,
and starts maintaining it. It's a boon for the world. Alice and Bob
don't have to share a CVS repository for their collaboration to occur.

Alice didn't NEED share-alike, source requirements, patent exclusions,
DRM exclusions, to create her work in the first place.

She doesn't not need it however.

If it's something she does as a one-off, she does alone, and her
end-result is a self-contained work,

There's no such thing.

then she could just as easily
release it under CC-PD and be done with it. If she wants to make
her work as widely available as possible, Public Domain is the
way to go.

She doesn't NEED an alphabet soup license to protect her project
if it is as simplistice and self-contained as you say.

The network of which her work is a part increasingly does as the public domain and private/fair use are reduced through legislation.

what I >SAID< was that I haven't seen a project that NEEDS
the full license armor to protect the project while it is
in progress. You're example is NOT a project that NEEDS it.

Now, it could be that there is an implied "project" going on
under the vague heading of "Culture", but that's basically
design by evolution, releasing odd bits into the wild under
an overly-protective license under the hopes that someone
will pull it into a larger, not-yet-existing, project.

Kinda like a bazaar? ;-)

But even then, you didn't NEED the alphabet soup to do your
individual bit, your release into the wild.

If you don't want it being caged up and its offspring growing up in the zoo, you need to feed it some alphabet soup.

In a best case interpretation, it would be like Richard Stallman
releasing GCC without a vision of how it fits into the
grand scheme of a vision for a complete operating system
with full suite of appliations. But he keeps it GNU-GPL
because in his gut he thinks someone will morph it into
something big.

That's a pretty good best case. GPL'ing gcc has got the software development community C++. ADA, Objective-C, Java and other compilers.

Which only proves my point. I haven't SEEN a CC project
that requires alphabet soup protection. Releasing a
random bit of code, and crossing your fingers that it
will become part of some bigger, but yet unnamed, project
IS NOT A PROJECT. Using the term "Culture" to hide the
fact that it is NOT a project doesn't cut it.

Linus Torvalds set out to hack up a toy OS to run a terminal program on his anaemic PC so he could talk to his university network. IBM started out doing typewriters. For those of you who remember the 1980s games console boom, "Coleco" stands for Colorado Leather Company. :-)

Calling projects "projects" obscures the fact that many projects would defeat Project.

I'd say this is because stuff like MUSIC doesn't
segment easily.

Lawsuits have been lost on this assumption. :-) Music segments very easily, that's how we get remixing, cover versions, and plagiarism.

The amount of work to create a song is probably
on par with a movie short. its small enough that a small team
can pull it off in a short amount of time. But Opsound works
because it's like Wikipedia for music. Individuals can write a
single song/article and leave the rest for someone else.

Wikipedia items are the products of many hands and eyes. The Opsound songs that I've heard are hardly beacons of originality.

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
Every example of a successful, massive, long-term CC project has
been basically a massive aggregation project, aggregating small works
that don't segment easily into smaller chunks.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This is an artefact of the definitions being used. And even the oldest CC project is only 2 (!) years old, as opposed to Linux's 10+ and GNU's 20.

The whole sampling, remixing, mashup thing is just getting going with CC.

But massive aggregation is not the same as massive dervation,
building upon the various components to build something that
is a synergy, something that is more than the sum of its parts.
Opsound is a collection of music. Every song added to the aggregation
will increase the "value" of Opsound by 1. Wikipedia is a collection
of articles. every article added increases the value by 1.

It increases the number of *items* by one. That's no way to measure value.

If you take a compiler, and an editor, you could then do something
totally out of the box like use those two pieces to create a Kernel,
and suddenly those three components together have a value far greater
than 3.

All three will share common components, so it's not that simple. What if all three are just shells around functions in glibc? What if the compiler and editor run everywhere, but the kernel will only ever run on Alpha processors?

If The Beastie Boys sample a flute track and incorporates it into something breathtaking, are you really telling me that the value of music in the world has only gone up by one?

opsound doesn't need source code requirements because it is basically
an aggregation of independently created songs. opsound doesn't need
share-alike, it could just as easily use CC-BY, because there is no
massive chain of derivations going on.

The fact that there are no massive chains is more related to the youth of the project. This is similar to the debate over whether Open Source can foster "innovation".

As an aside, Loca Records (who for my money are a far more interesting project) have discussed open-source *production* of music by the group ML (see 3 on http://www.locarecords.com/downloads/LOCA-HowToOpenSource.pdf ) .

- Rob.





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page