Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Serge Wroclawski said:
> Many CC users, I think, aren't thinking of people like me when they put
> the licenses on the works.

People think of whatever they want to think of when they
license their work. The work automatically starts out as
"all rights reserved" to the creator. Any rights that the
author gives up is of some benefit to the rest fo teh world.

There is definitely something to be said for some
of the lessons learned from the 1980's software
licenses such as "non-commercial" and "educational use only"
and experiments like "shareware", all of which showed that
the key to success of a gift economy is locking in the license,
prohibiting anyone from redistributing teh work with more or
less rights than the original. Copyleft guarantees license
compatibility with itself and any work under the same license
for all eternity.

But creative commons isn't just about gift economies.
If it were, CC would have drafted the ShareAlike
license and called it a day.

CC is about a spectrum of licenses from gift economy
to market economy, from sharealike to noderivatives,
from publicdomain to noncommercial. And each of those
uses has different requirements, therefore different
licenses, some of which are incompatible with other
licenses, and incompatible with the wishes of downstream
authors.

That's just the way it works.

-- 
Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP Law.
http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/