Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> 1. To be honest, this kind of confusion of copyright with a patent
> "right" and a trademark "right" (and a database "right", etc.) is
> exactly why "Intellectual Property" is such a bad label. The CC
> licenses are copyright licenses. They do not need to exclude "other IP
> rights" because these are unrelated. WIPO needs reform here, not the CC
> licenses. :-)

I don't understand why Intellectual works should not be handled
together in a single license if the purpose of that license is
to provide a "spectrum of rights" as is CC's declared mission.

Any intellectual work that can be copied and distributed electronically
can be impacted by copyright, patent, trademarks, database,
and even freaky-dink stuff like DMCA by anti-circumvention clauses.

Software can be patented, so GPL prevents patents from being used
to exclude the community from using derived works just because
someone works it into their patent. You'd be a fool for any long-term
GiftEconomy project to ignore the game-theory-based Strategic Moves
that could be taken by an individual to circumvent the
community-protecting defense of a purely-copyright-only copyleft license.

Should CC turn a blind eye to other ways of restricting community
works because these approaches do not fit in the realm of copyright?

ShareAlike, at the very least, should make an attempt to secure
the works to the community, and should not limit itself to copyright
if other means are available to restrict a work and turn it into a
proprietary lever.

The various Market Economy works can ignore the other rights
(patents, etc), since their purpose is to give up only enough
rights to genrate free advertising/free distribution for the
original author, so giving up patent rights doesn't make sense.

I don't think the NonCommercial license needs to say
"this license makes no claims on patent, trademark, etc rights"
because unless a right is specifically licensed, it is kept by
the original owner. Though it might not hurt to put that in
the page about licenses.

ShareAlike, however, could benefit from community protection
being extended to include patents, trademarks, etc.