Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 4 Jan 2005, at 22:32, Greg London wrote:

> 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.

IMHO the examples I gave allow a finer grained control of those 
rights/monopolies, with rights-holders being able to control how 
trademarked materials are used (and interact with copyrighted material) 
than combining them with copyright.

> 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.

The CC copyright licenses cover anti-circumvention, performance rights 
and even moral rights. But these all relate to copyright rather than 
being distinct rights or restrictions.

> 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.

My point was that trademarks (etc.) could conceivably be licensed in 
themselves, and so would deserve their own license. This could be 
interesting for creative use of licensing, and would not encumber the 
copyright licenses.

Trademarks (etc.) can also be used in/by copyrighted works, so how 
trademarks (etc.) interact with CC-licensed work is also important *if* 
it is going to have an impact on the intention of the license. The 
examples you give of keeping the "other IP" licensing congruent with 
the copyright licensing is one solution, and is the one that I'm coming 
to favour for handling moral rights. But each kind of "IP" is different 
and has different requirements and effects, and I am not sure how 
effectively they could be used to torpedo copyright-based 
creative/cultural (rather than technical) projects. If anyone has any 
examples I am interested in understanding this.

One example of a separate trademark and copyright license serving the 
community quite well is the way that games publishers are still using 
the OGL (copyright license) but are using d20 (trademark license for 
OGL work) less since WoTC revised the d20 license terms. This wouldn't 
have been possible if the two were combined.

- Rob.



--
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license.
http://www.robmyers.org/weblog/ - Art, aesthetics & free culture weblog.