Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Peter Brink said:
> A Open Source license is a contract, the provisions of which are
> governed by contract law - not copyright law. The terms of the license
> grants the licensee the right to exercise rights he would not have under
> copyright law. The work being licensed is still protected by copyright
> law and any use not mentioned in the license is thus still governed by
> copyright law.

first of all, you're far too fast and loose lumping whatever it is
you're lumping under this umbrella you think is labeled "Open Source"

There are a number of Public Domain style licenses which are also
open source and are simple grants of copyright by the author to
anyone. The BSD style licenses simply release rights without any
contractual agreements.

Second of all, even the most restrictive open source license,
GNU-GPL, can be viewed as a grant of rather specific and detailed
set of rights by the author to whoever wants them. The rights
granted are a subset of copyright rights. to quote the GNU-GPL:

"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
 covered by this License"

An author granting the right for anyone to distribute the original
work as long as the author's name is highlighted in red is still
a function of copyright alone. a subset of the right to distribute
is granted by the author.

None of the rights granted by the GPL are conditional, which would
require an agreement from the downstream person. all the rights
are granted with a detailed list of where the right ends and
kept by the author.

third of all, your assertion that code is purely functional
and is/should not covered by copyright tells me that you
don't write software for a living, or if you do, it must be
an excruciatingly boring job for you. My experience as an
engineer is that programming languages have huge room for
creative, artistic expression from the author. The courts
seem to recognize this as well.