Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Peter Brink <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>]

Greg London skrev:
> 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.

When two people agree upon something that agreement is a legally 
speaking a contract. No open source license is anything else but a contract.

> 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.

A contract is a deed where someone is offering a grant to someone else. 
The grant need not be onerous, it can be beneficial, that is the offer 
need not have an condition. All open source licenses contain an offer, 
which is granted provided that the user agrees to the terms of the 
contract. Thus all open source licenses have at least one condition - 
that the user agrees to follow the terms of the contract.

That the offer is a waiver of a copyright really doesn't change a thing.


> 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.

Just for the record that wasn't my assertion. However (for the record) - 
the fact that there is room for creativity when writing source code 
doesn't mean that such possibilities are used. Functions, procedures and 
methods run a real risk of not being copyrightable, simply because they 
do tend to contain expressions which are purely functional.

/Peter Brink