Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Todd A. Jacobs said:
> On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 01:58:33PM -0500, Greg London wrote:
>
>> commercial works) and the individual who restricts the community so
>> that the original author remains permanently at an advantage
>> (CC-SA-NC).
>
> The implication being that there's no value at all in non-commercial
> rights? That's awfully narrow-minded.

Huh? No. The implication is that the author of a CC-SA-NC work
still has the capability to use commercial rights and the
community never will.

You argued that even Copyleft authors can create their own
personal forks, and argued that it was no different than
a CC-SA-NC author retaining the rights to create a commercial
fork. I'm saying they're completely different scenarios.

It's two different strategic game-theory charts.

Copyleft is a strategic move made by the author that
effectively prohibits the author from competing against
the community version of the work. The only proprietary
fork that the author can make that has any functional
advantage over the community version is to combine
the work with a non-copyleft work and create a new
work that is not copyleft. The copyleft version cannot
combine with a non-copyleft work, but the commuity is
empowered to re-create their own version of the combined
work.

But the author CAN"T give away the right to create
proprietary mixes because then it's not a COPYLEFT
license anymore, its a PUBLIC DOMAIN style license.

To put a work under copyleft, the author is basically
saying "The community will have the same rights as I do,
with the exception of creating proprietary forks,
which is a right I'll withold so that all community
derivatives must remain within the community."

I don't have any numbers, but I'd bet my bottom dollar
that of all the authors who contributed work under
a copyleft license, the vast majority of them did NOT
exercise the right to create a proprietary fork.

Compare that to CC-NC-SA. Rather than being a strategic
move that prevents the author from making certain moves
in the future against the community, rather than treating
the community and author as the same, the CC-NC-SA
license first witholds a substantial right from the
community (commercial use) so that author and community
are not treated alike, and secondly it basically promises
that the author will exercise those commercial rights
at some point in the future.

I don't have any numbers on this either, but I'd bet
my bottom dollar that the vast majority of CC-NC
authors have exercised their commercial rights to their
work or will as soon as someone offers them money for it.

The implication being that NonCommercial-ShareAlike
is an oxymoron. THe author isn't sharing, and the
author and community are not treated alike.

It's like "Free Steak Knives" that are never free.

> Fan-fiction, as well as educational, public-service, and hobbyist
> collective works are all non-commercial uses which could benefit
> from a large NC commons; I'm sure there are others.

See, the thing is that all these non-commercial uses could
be accomplished with just CC-NC. None of the downstream
people have any incentive to withold some deriviative they
created from anyone else since no one (including themselves,
and even the original author) will ever be able to make money
off of it. Which also means that while I assume they could
sue for infringment if another fan used their derivative of
your work non-commercially, they'd be paying a lawyer money,
but they can't claim any monetary damages, since they could
never make any money from the derivative.

Putting ShareAlike on a CC-NC work is like carrying
shark repellent in the desert. It'll protect you
against something that most likely will never occur.
I mean, the desert could be in Nevada and you might fall
into a shark tank at a casino in Las Vegas, but I think
we're talking about a really oddball case for it to
actually be useful.