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cc-licenses - Re: Share-revenues as an alternative to Non-commercial

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "David Christie" <dc AT sover.net>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Share-revenues as an alternative to Non-commercial
  • Date: Tue, 3 May 2005 17:47:41 -0700

Greg London said:

What you're proposing sounds like a sort of
compulsory license, except that it's voluntary,

Yes, the idea was to grant commercial rights to everyone up front, at least nominally. The idea is you use this as an alternative to an open source license like the GPL, because you want help programming (derivative works). You also have to figure out how to share any revenue you recover with developers who help you, but that is more complicated, as you note.

Though the "default price" might be prohibitive for most businesses, perhaps it would be reasonable for very small businesses and individuals. Ideally the Share-revenues provision could function voluntarily for small-scale commercial use, while effectively precluding larger-scale exploitation without a contract.

This would widen the rights that can be purchased
up front to any commercial use, any derivative.

Yes, though the price might vary by use. The nature of the derivative works is not restricted.

But since it always sends a percentage back to the
first author, the number of downstream generations
will likely be limited to one. if you open it up to
anyone who contributes, the finite resource of the
commercial revenue becomes a commons, and tragedy
soon ensues as hangers on and others want to derive
your work simply to ride the gravy train. which means
the only people you'll want to contribute to your
work are poeple who pay you, meaning the only people
you need to interact with are the people pay you,
meaning people who don't pay you are people you'll
want to restrict with CC-BY-NC-ND so they don't try
to move into your intellectual common.

That's one way it could go wrong, for sure. But back up to the bit about the number of downstream generations being one. Isn't that pretty typical of successful open source projects? How many downstream generations does Linux have? Isn't Torvalds still in charge, so to speak, at least of the main fork? A de facto authority (constrained by reputation and consent, not law) seems to be a common theme of many successful projects. Sometimes (as with Apache) the authority is not an individual but a committee; and it's always distributed over an advisory team in practice. So, couldn't revenue capture (and redistribution to contributing developers) be handled by such a project authority? Not by the license terms, and not by the terms of revenue sharing contracts with the customers. By judgement calls made by the copyright owner(s) after the revenue comes in, essentially. (Not too different than the way any business employing developers makes decisions about rewarding them.)

And for non-commercial use, the number of downstream generations is still unlimited.

CC-BY-NC-ND + contract provision for royalties
is all you need, and I don't think you need a
new license to do that.

Except that ND denies open source developers permission to work on the project, and NC removes any commercial incentive for them to do so. The idea was all about providing more incentives for open source developers, not removing them. In particular it's about finding a way to funnel the commercial rewards of open source development back to the developers. Not just to the original developer (or why use open source at all)?

"CC-BY-NC-ND + contract provision for royalties" sounds very much like the closed source method of software development, even if the source code is readable. A form of contract programming? I was hoping for something that was a subtle shift to conventional open source development that would bring in the commercial motivation without spoiling the ambiance. (If anything involving money can ever be non-corrupting, which I seriously doubt.)

Thanks very much for your thoughtful response Greg -- it's given me a lot to think about.





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