Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Serge Wroclawski <serge AT tux.org>]

On Sun, 1 May 2005, Greg London wrote:

> 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.

CC is an enabler to moving away from the standard All Rights Reserved to
allowing work to be used differently and shared.

Every time I've gone to one of the people whose work I want to use and
said what I wanted to do, they've all said "Oh, go ahead and so that.", to
which I've sometimes responded "Why don't you change the license to be
less restrictive and then I wouldn't have to ask."

One licensee actually flaunts a huge license violation on his web site. He
has a ShareAlike license and then says that his work was used by a
television show. Of course the television show isn't ShareAlike.

People, especially software-esque people would have a tendancy to want to
use ShareAlike.

People who think "I'd sure like to get paid for a commercial use of my
work" would think Non-Commercial.

I don't have a direct problem with the licenses, only that choosing the
license may not realize that putting extra restrictions on will have
unforseen consequences. This is something we can make more clear to
people.

- Serge Wroclawski