Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Judith Combs" <jadelec1 AT san.rr.com>]

> > I am a fiber artist, with a side interest in historical needlework.
I
> > have a collection of early (1840's - 1890's) crochet instructions,
> > patterns and samples that I have been translating into American
English
> > modern terminology.  I ultimately want to make copies of the
originals
> > openly available to anyone who wants to use them, as long as no one
> > tries to restrict their use.
> 
> If you put something like "Published 1890, now Public Domain"
> then that should be all you need to say "Hands off".
> If anyone tries to restrict their use, then others should be able
> to go to your originals. i.e. the way to prevent restrictions
> is to give it to more than one place so that no one has a monopoly.
> 
> I don't think you can claim copyright on the originals just because
> you scanned them into a computer, 

Ah, thank you!  That's simple, and should make sense even to
temperamental needleworkers - the copyright discussion flame wars in the
fiber art groups are nasty.  I don't want to restrict use of the copies
of the originals - I just want to make sure no one else tries to.
Including the many eBay sellers who are selling them on CD's lately.
You're right - I'll just have to get creative about making the originals
accessible in enough places so that it's not worth it for anyone to try
to hoard them.  The pdf files are usually a little less than 1 MB per
page, if there are illustrations, which is usually the case - I tried to
put 10MB worth up on a Geocities page once; the traffic overloaded the
site immediately, and Yahoo shut it down.  But the news this morning on
Google's library project is good.
Judith