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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: "Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>
  • 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: Wed, 4 May 2005 13:23:32 -0400 (EDT)


David Christie said:
> But consider copyleft licenses, like GPL and Sleepycat. These also function
> to enable commerce, through dual-licensing schemes. For example, Sleepycat
> sells commercial licenses which grant exemption the copyleft provision of
> their open source license. MySQL does the same thing. This is very common.
> That's why those open source developers are profitable. It's their business
> model.

Sleepycat doesn't sell a "commercial" license,
they sell a "non-copyleft" license.
GPL allows anyone to sell Sleepycat.
What Sleepycat sells is a license that allows
someone else to combine that work with
non-GPL code.

But to do that, sleepycat cannot accept
ANY code contributions from any outside individuals.
If Sleepycat consisted of Alice, Bob, and Charlie,
then they cannot accept code contributions from
Dave unless they get Dave to reassign copyright
ownership to sleepycat.

Which means that Sleepycat does not benefit from
the usual outside contributions that occur in a
copyleft project. Sleepycat can be USED by copyleft
projects, and Linux and other projects can modify
it and include it with their distributions, but
the version sold by Sleepycat does not include
any of these outside contributions.

Which means that the version SOLD by Sleepycat
is ZERO generations removed FROM Sleepycat.

You can do this now with CC-SA.

This is vastly different than Share-Revenue
in which Alice releases a work to the world CC-SR,
and Bob, Charlie, and Dave contribute work to it,
and then when Eve comes along and wants to use the
work commercially, she pays Alice money and gets
a license.

And if you want a license that allows Bob, Charlie,
and Dave to get some of the money, then you're
back to the finite resources of the royalties
(a commons) and you've got to figure out how much
goes to whom, and you've got to decide who you
are going to accept contributions from and
include them on the "royalty list".

At that point, you're no longer dealing with a
simple copyright license. You're talking about
a contract between many parties.


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




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