Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

drew Roberts said:
> Also, people slap a copyright page on the front of a book without being
> specific as to what inside is copyright nad what isn't. (Or what can be
> pulled out without violating the copyright.)

Since a copyright notice isn't even required
for the author to protect their work under copyright,
the change needed to do this may be significant.

Also, I don't think copyright notice pages should be
turned into "Copyright Law Explanations", explaning
that the recipe's are functional and therefore not
subject to copyright, while the pictures and text
is subject ot copyright, that the sheet music for
some song is Public Domain, but that the collection
is considered to be under copyright.

It would be helpful to the reader, yes, but the problem
is that copyright law keeps changing every few years,
so your copyright page would soon be out of date.

Boat hull designs started out as functional.
the author puts that in the copyright page.
Congress changes the law. The copyright page
now tells readers that the hull is not subject
to copyright, when in actuallity it is.
So then you either recall your books or
deal with the consequences.

I'd also not want to see a large set of legal requirements
being placed on authors in explaining the in's and out's
of their work, what's public domain, what isn't, etc.
If for no other reason than because authors aren't
lawyers, and requiring them to act like one means they'll
have to hire one every time they publish a single photograph
on the web, every time the contribute code to an open
source project, every time they write a short story.

The reason Open Source projects work is because the cost
of entry is low enough that the project can thrive based
on nothing more than the surplus time of the contributers.
i.e. they have a day job, and then they contribute to some
project. If you make it so difficult that they spend so much
of their time doing legal stuff rather than writing software
(or whatever), then the project will likely fade out.

I do not represent Creative Commons.
I am not a lawyer.

Greg