Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

My lord, you talk like a lecturing professor.
Are you scolding me like a problem student?

Look, pal (and I use that word because anything else
wouldn't be safe for the kiddies), all I did was
try to put your vagueness into real world context.

You start out by mentioning unnamed horrors of the
possibility of document snatchers and how
a lack of moral rights will have an absolute
and unquestionable chilling effect in some
unquantified way.

All I did was ask for examples.

https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2005-March/001933.html

When you gave a paragraph long lecture including this mumbo jumbo:
"Moral rights, like fair use, is a euphemism for a set of
attitudes about how one's ideas are germinated and used,"

All I did was put Fair Use into real-world terms,
i.e. what I can and cannot do because of Fair Use.
And then I gave you a real-world example about VCR's.

https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2005-March/001939.html

So it wasn't about me saying "rights" are whatever
I say they are, it was about me putting "euphamism"
and "set of attitudes" and all your other mumbo jumbo
into some real-world context. Can I or can I not make
a copy of this TV program with a VCR.

And as for my "op-ed rant about the dangers of moral rights"
I could say the same for you emotive and heart-string
tugging tale of how Copyright and Moral Rights are
a right to be compared with the right to free speech
or freedom of religion. They may be written into
European constitutions, but they're not written into
the US constitution that way. That I don't recognize
it as a Human Right the way I hold Freedom of Speech
is my own damn business and I don't need to apologize
for it to you. Nor do I expect to get insulted by
someone who thinks they know better than me.

As for the dangers, perhaps I wasn't specific enough for you,
but they were generally directed towards ShareAlike and
Copyleft situations. The Open Source Definition says that
an approved license may not discriminate against persons,
groups, or fields of endeavor. And I can see all sorts
of ways that Moral Rights could be used to do just that.
Microsoft decides to release some open source software
but then invokes "Moral Rights" when Linux or any other
major competitor uses it.

It also seems to open a large gift economy project to
a multitude of problems if one of the contributers
sees someone he doesn't like using his work
and he uses "moral rights" to put a stop to it.
Either a project will have to keep track of everything
that every individual contributes so that when someone
complains, their contribution can be removed, or projects
will have to find a way to get contributers to waive
moral rights (which apparently cannot be done).

So, my emphasis has been on keeping it in real world
context. I haven't been defining words to mean whatever
I want them to mean, I've been trying to cut through
the words and get at what I can do because of them.

disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Creative Commons.



Peter Knupfer, H-Net said:
> Aside from Mr. London's intemperate op-ed rant about the dangers of
> moral rights and about "rights" being whatever he says they are
> regardless of what anybody else (including courts, constitutions,
> legislators, and treaties, I guess) says they are,

> before London lets fly with another eclectic bit of street law.