Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Tuesday 01 February 2005 09:26 am, Greg London wrote:
> Gottfried Hofmann said:
> >> There are different issues with different forms of expression in how
> >> practical it is to extract a PD portion of a work.  In a painting, this
> >> might be easy, less so with an audio recording, lesser still with a
> >> computer program.  Yet all of these are copyrightable works.  And, of
> >> course, the CC organization doesn't recommend their copyright licenses
> >> for computer programs.
> >
> > Isn't it commmon among programmers to use public domain code in GPLed
> > programs (which means the public domain code will be relicensed to GPL
> > in that case)?
>
> technically, no computer code has become public domain yet.
> Some programmers release their code under a license that
> gives away 99.9% of the rights (BSD license, etc).
> But the only way for something to be truly "public domain"
> is for the copyright term to expire. (or if the code was written
> before the 70's to have been published without registration or
> a copyright notice. Now, copyright is automatic and impossible
> to switch off.

Which reminds me of something I thought of on Jan 25/2005 and posted over at 
advogate:

http://www.advogato.org/person/zotz/

What if we push for a change in the copyright law? Something like this:

" Unless otherwise stated, all works are automatically copyrighted under a 
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license."

 Could be GPL for programs.

How would that change things? Would it be better for the average Joe? Or 
worse?

I need to think some more on this matter. If it would make things better, how 
can we move in that direction? 

drew