Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Friday, March 18, 2005, at 04:48PM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> 
wrote

>Now, I'm not certain, but I THINK that distribution
>of silicon does not qualify as distribution of the
>work itself. 

IANAL, but the silicon could be regarded as the executable code to the work's 
source code, so this would possibly be "distribution".

>I believe that is functional instead
>of "expression" and functional isn't covered by copyright.

This does look like industrial design rather than "writing", but I think that 
the pattern on the silicon is at least a derivative work, possibly even just 
a machine translation.

>The alternative would be to put all open cores under
>something like the LGPL and define the boundary as
>the verilog module layer.

This would probably work for the second license requirement given, although 
the "object code" might need to be provided if the silicon doesn't fulfill 
the criteria for being dynamically linked to, if that makes sense.

- Rob.