Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Rob Myers said:
> <email AT greglondon.com> wrote:
>>holding it all rights reserved, and defending it fiercely against any
>>attempts to infringe on that content.
>
> Nope. That's copyright. Copyright is not free speech.

free speech is a superset including copyright.
If you get up in front of an audience and ad lib a speech,
it is not under copyright because it isn't in fixed medium.
So there are things you can express under Free Speech that
do not fall under Copyright.

>>Even if the infringer claims they
>>are simply making it part of the ongoing conversation.
>
> This is the heart of my argument. "Freedom of speech" does not cover the
> business model of "piracy". Why should it cover the business model of
> proprietarising Free code?

Copyleft is about protecting copyleft code from being proprietized.
Once code is contributed to the community under Copyleft,
then copyleft keeps the work inside the community and
does nto allow anyone to take it private.

The individual is prevented from creating a derived work that is private.

Copyleft won't allow it.

But copyright WILL allow it.
You can create a proprietary fork of someone's BSD code.
Which means copyright is a superset of copyleft.
And which means copyright allows individuals do more
than copyleft allows.


>>Copyleft is about preventing individual ownership
>>to protect the community as a whole.
>
> A community consists of individuals. If freedom is conceived of as
> unconstrained action, there are various "freedoms" that must be removed from
> individuals to ensure the freedom of individuals.

Read your bill of rights.
They are all rights guaranteed to the individual
by restricting what the state can do.

Copyleft guarantees the work will remain in the COMMUNITY
by restricting what an INDIVIDUAL can do.

The metaphor equating copyleft with Freedom of Speech
or any other rights ignores the fact that every right
guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are rights guaranteed
to the individual, rights that restrict the community or state.

Copyleft guarantees the right to code, the right to derive,
the right to distribute derivations of other people's code,
but this is a COMMUNITY right. The individual is restricted
from creating a derived version of someone's code, compiling
it, and distributing a binary. The INDIVIDUAL is restricted
for the benefit of the COMMUNITY.

This is the anti-thesis of how every right guaranteed in
the Bill of Rights works.

First amendment:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

Copyleft:
Individuals cannot distribute derivative works
of community code unless they also distribute
the source code to the community.