Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Daniel Carrera <dcarrera AT math.umd.edu>]

Greg London wrote:

> > PD is not a license. It means that you give up all rights to the work
> > until the end of time.
> 
> I swear I read somewhere that you cannot NOT get the rights to your work
> since copyright is automatic.
> 
> So, if you write something, copyright is automatically assigned to you,
> and that the only way to give them up was to license them away.

Yes and no. Copyright *is* automatic. But you are still allowed to 
transfer your copyright, or give it up entirely. A lot of companies 
require you to do that exactly (assign the copyright to them). This is 
also common in Free/Open Source Projects. The Free Software Foundation 
requires copyright assignment for all GNU software, Novell requires 
assignment for Mono, the Apache Foundation does too, as does Sun 
Microsystems for OpenOffice.org. Well, in that last instance, Sun only 
requires a "joint" copyright. So you both have the copyright to the work. 

In any event, you can also forfeit copyright entirely. This is what we 
call Public Domain.

Now, copyright is automatic, indeed. So you have to take extra action to 
either transfer it or forgeit it. If you do nothing, you keep it.


> > May I ask, what is the work in question?
> > Maybe I can offer an opinion on which is better.
> 
> Well, it's either be a complete piece of crap that no one will read,
> or it will be something that puts IP law into a historical perspective
> the makes it plainly obvious to the average citizen just how out of
> whack things have gotten and causes a complete reform of IP law in the US.

I don't see any need, or benefit, in that being in the Public Domain. 
I think I'd recommend the CC-BY license.

If it were, for example, photos, clipart or sounds, I would have 
recommended Public Domain.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel Carrera          | I don't want it perfect,
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