Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> On 1 Feb 2005, at 21:05, Greg London wrote:
>
>> Free speech lets me create and distribute proprietary forks of someone
>> else's BSD code.
>
> No, that's censorship. It is censorship of the immediate code and it is
> censorship of the ongoing conversation.

Bwah hah ha HA! yeah, right.

free speech includes writing a book that dissents against the government,
holding it all rights reserved, and defending it fiercely against any
attempts to infringe on that content. Even if the infringer claims they
are simply making it part of the ongoing conversation.

Can we stop redefining words like censorship to mean "All Rights Reserved"???

That definition only works in the "All copyright is evil" cult, because
ANY restriction must inherently be evil. All works should be Public Domain.
Any attempts to create a proprietary work can only be for evil doers.

Please stop drinking the Kool-Aid, and lets deal with the real world here.

The real world allows proprietary works.
The real world also allows free speech.
Free speech can include proprietary works.
Free speech is protected against censorship.
Censorship is anything intended to stifle dissent.

If you insist on calling "All Rights Reserved" a form of Censorship,
then I'll stop wasting my time discussing this with folks who
live in fantasy land.


>> Copyleft isn't free as in free speech.
>> It is community-centric.
>
> Is freedom of speech an individual right or a community responsibility?

Free Speech is an individual right.
The STATE (community) is prohibited from censoring any INDIVIDUAL
based on their political ideas or beliefs.

>> Individuals are not allowed to make proprietary forks
>> of someone else's copyleft code.
>
> And people aren't allowed to make proprietary forks of proprietary
> code. They aren't allowed to make copyleft forks of proprietary code
> either. So how is proprietary code more free, or better for freedom,
> than copyleft code? How does it result in programmers who have more
> rights, who are freer?

Because copyright allows me to make a proprietary fork of BSD code.
Copyright includes the full spectrum of rights from all rights reserved
to public domain and copyleft in between.

Copyleft includes only a subset of copyright.
Anything that is copyleft and anything that is public domain or BSD.

Draw the set of copyleft ONLY, and there is no option to take a public
domain work and make it proprietary. that is OUTSIDE of copyleft.
It is something you CANNOT DO in copyleft. You need copyright law to do it.

The individual cannot make a proprietary fork in a world where only copyleft
exists.

Copyleft is all about taking works created by individuals,
and adding it to the community pool of works,
and making sure no one can take them OUT of the community pool.

That isn't about individual freedom being protected against
abuse by the community or state. That's about creating and
protecting a community and protecting against individuals
who could otherwise create proprietary forks.

Simple argument,
copyleft is a subset of all that is copyright.
If only copyleft existed, you would not have the
same individual freedoms that you do now with copyright
as a superset. You would not be able to create a proprietary
work in a world where only copyleft existed.

Copyleft is about preventing individual ownership
to protect the community as a whole.