Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 4 Feb 2005, at 22:54, Josh Rosenblum wrote:

> To help pay for the production of this content, I plan first to 
> release it in a limited fashion, charging those who place a high value 
> on freshness of the content.  Once the restricted-release period is 
> over, the content would be released under a standard CC license.

Cool. It sounds like you are basically CC'ing your ongoing archives. 
This will help make your service authoritative. Serve the archive 
content with contextual advertising and you may even make some money 
off of it directly.

You may find this article about the economics of online daily 
newspapers and their archives interesting:

        http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/25/why_do_newspapers_ch.html

> As I understand, the only way to shoehorn this into the CC view of the 
> world would be to release content under some custom license for the 
> initial embargo period, then re-license it under one of the CC 
> licenses at a future date.  This seems kludgey, and perhaps I'm 
> missing something.

It's not shoehorning really. A good way of looking at it might be that 
you are providing two separate services, each providing value to users 
and yourself, each with an appropriate license. The commercial service 
license works with the value of timely access. The CC licenses work 
with the value of ensuring ongoing access and relevance, building the 
future commons as you say.

> Should CC licenses define effectivity dates, it might address this 
> problem.  In addition, if the licenses internalized this 
> time-sensitivity, then the content's metadata remains within the 
> purview of the CC RDF/metadata tools from its moment of release.

There was some discussion on cc-bizcom around timed licenses, with some 
research to back up the idea. There's some links from the list details 
here:

        http://creativecommons.org/discuss#commonwealth

and there may be more of interest in the list  archives.

- Rob.