Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Johannes Ernst said:
> The only issue I'm raising on this list is:
> do or don't the CC licenses currently have any impact on IP rights
> other than copyright.
>
> The possible answers seem to be:
>   1) they do not touch any rights that may or may not exist under
> trademark, patent etc. law
>   2) they do touch those rights, and this is how
>   3) the issue is unclear.
>
> I think the easiest fix would be to answer my question per #1, and
> clearly state so in the license text.

I'm not sure how CC licenses relate to patents. I haven't read them
for that usage, so I don't even know if the word patent exists in the
licenses wording.

But I think there is a difference between "easiest fix" and "best fix".

Ideally, any Gift Economy license would be as aggressive as possible
in preventing patents from monopolizing community contributions into
proprietary inventions. The idea is to keep contributions as community 
property.
This would include the CC-ShareAlike license.

Market Economy licenses might avoid licensing any possible patent rights
so that the inventor can write about their invention and license it
CC-NC but retain all patent rights to make some money on their invention.
This would be for licenses like CC-NonCommercial and CC-NoDerivatives

Public Domain style licenses may wish to specifically state that
anyone can patent an idea derived from the original work.
(I can't recall offhand if patent law would require this or not)
This would include CC-BY and the PublicDomain dedication stuff.