Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

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.