Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

drew Roberts said:
> Are you sure you have your terminology right? Are you speaking from a US 
> point
> of view, a british commonwealth pov, or some other pov?
>
> I read a book within the last few years by Edward Rutherfurd called The 
> Forest
> (he also wrote Sarum, London, and Russka which I had read before - I liked
> them all) and it deals some with the laws of the commons for a forest in
> England. IIRC, the ideas do not match with your thoughts. That is why I ask.

A commons, first, is a natural resource with no restrictions imposed on it.
You then get "the tragedy of the commons" because individuals are
incentivized to overfish overgraze, etc.

the communities then may decide to impose restrictions on how
the community may use the common resource, so that the
resource isn't depleted, exhausted, killed to the point where
recovery is impossible.

Public Domain is an unrestricted commons.
due to the non-zero-sum nature of intellectual works,
you can't have overfishing of the intelectual commons.

For intellectual works, a "regulated commons" could describe
public domain and all rights reserved. It is regulated in that
people can take from teh commons, create something new,
and hold it as their own property for a while, before allowing
the work to be treated as public domain again.

The same way a regulated commons forest might allow
someone to cut down some trees to use to build a house
on their private property, copyright is a regulated commons,
allowing someone to create something new, take it off of the
public domain commons for a while, and treat it as private property.

I'm not talking about regulated commons, though.

When I'm talking about an intellectual commons,
I mean unrestricted works or Public Domain works.

Copyright and Patent rights is one form of management.
So is copyleft. So is creative commons spectrum of rights.

But since managed commons basically covers teh whole spectrum,
it becomes a useless term.

So, by commons, I mean unrestricted or Public Domain