Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Peter Knupfer, H-Net said:
> Context matters, and context is the essence of moral rights.  It gives
> meaning to otherwise isolated information and affects the reputation
> and, sometimes, credentials, of a work's creator.

the examples below show no situation where "reputation" was threatened.

> Nor is this about the
> extent to which moral rights "saves the day."  Moral rights, like fair
> use, is a euphemism for a set of attitudes about how one's ideas are
> germinated and used,

Maybe I'm too much of an american, but "Fair Use" is not an attitude.
Fair Use encompasses a set of rights that remain public rather than
being granted exclusively to the author with all the other rights
to the work.

The right to record a TV program on a VCR being a major Fair Use right.

> and if people believe that such rights are not
> available to them, they will be disinclined to share.

they may be disinclined to share, but others might not.
We do not have "Moral Rights" the way I understand Europe
does, and we've managed to find authors willing to
publish and share works.


> My problem in these examples, is not that the refusal of permission is
> justified -- Holocaust deniers will never listen to anybody, but the
> audience needs to see their views rebutted.  But Jeffersonian
> rationalism is but a theory when stacked up against human nature.  My
> problem is that the CC license could have a chilling effect on the
> willingness to publish and share in the first place, and that important
> works will not be available to the audiences that might benefit most
> from them.


open source allows code forks.
some people argue that it's a bad thing because
you could have a community split rather than
work together on the same piece of code.
Linux has KDE and Gnome as graphical interfaces
as the result of a permanent fork.

But the only way to prevent forking is to maintain
some sort of control over the work. And if you
maintain control, then others are disincentivized
to make modifications/improvements because they
then have to get it approved.

I hear your arguments about "human nature",
and I get there's a difference between
open source software and a work about the
holocaust. However, I'm more of the opinion
that while the context may be different,
the human nature at the root is similar.

Controlling open source would kill open source.
It defeats the purpose of enabling a community.
And even with this supposed lack of central control,
Linux survives against a multi-billion dollar
competitor by the name of Microsoft.

Microsoft is the racist to Linux's holocaust story.

And yet despite Microsoft's commercial advantage
and billions of dollars at its disposal for spreading
fear uncertainty and doubt, Linux still survives,
thrives even. All this without Moral Rights to
protect it.

I guess what I'm getting at is that you'll never
eliminate all the morons/racists/etc in the world.
Someone somewhere will swear up and down that
the American moon program was a hoax and they'll
use Public Domain NASA photos to attempt to disprove
it.

Moral rights won't make the morons go away,
it'll just slow them down a day while they
google for new material.

And while you argue that Moral Rights will be
an incentive for people to contribute,
the open source approach to things would seem
to say that it also might DIS-incentivize people
from actually doing anything with the work.

Linux would be nothing if no one was willing
to touch Linus Torvald's kernel software.

So then moral rights becomes a trade off.
incentive for the author becomes
a disincentive for a community project.