Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

Rob Meyers wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 25, 2005, at 04:03PM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com>
>>Could Bob use DRM on Alice's CC-BY work to transmit
>>Alice's work only for viewing but not for downloading?
>>Since CC-BY allows proprietary forks, allowing DRM
>>on such a fork seems natural.
>
> When transmitting the unaltered work (rather than a derivative), I think
> Bob has to allow others to use the work under its CC-BY license (is this
> right?), so he could not use DRM. When transmitting a derivative, he just
> has to Attribute, so he can use DRM as long as he puts Alice's name next
> to his.

I have a hard time believing that.
For a license that allows proprietary forks,
what's the point of demanding the original
must be transmitted "in the clear"?
Anyone who wants to get around it will
simply create a derivative, fork it
to all rights reserved, give attribution
to Alice, and transmit it via DRM.

> So this is not a blanket ban on DRM as such. But I still don't think it
> would allow dual-format provision of work (ie Real/OGG) as individual
> copies of the work might still not allow the user to use the work in
> accordance with the license.

For CC-SA works, allowing dual-format would kill
any share-alike benefit. Anyone who wanted to
compete against the share-alike project could
get around the sharealike license via DRM
and make the original available in a filing cabinet.

For CC-SA, the work and the license must be atomic.
and by atomic I mean from the Greek word 'atomos'
meaning 'indivisible'. The work must always satisfy
the license. If Bob transmits the work via DRM,
it must give Charlie a version of the work that
is free and clear of any Rights Restrictions.

If users are allowed to split this atom, then you
get the GPL problems of "binary" versus "source",
and the CC licenses have no terms to handle the
differences between these two versions.

If CC-SA is applied to software, it would allow
Bob to execute the code from behind the scenes
for his website, without actually distributing
the work and invoking the requirements of CC-SA.
i.e. Bob can "use" the work, without "distributing" it,
and Charlie can view the results of the work but
cannot demand a free and clear copy. But that's
specific to functional works getting executed
versus artistic works getting distributed.

If an artistic work licensed CC-SA is distributed,
then that work is atomically bound to its license,
and distributing the work via DRM must still
give the recipient a version that has NO RIGHTS
MANAGEMENT attached to it.

This is the way the CC-SA license needs to be.
I'm not entirely sure that it does this.
I think it does. But then I thought CC-NC
meant no monetary exchange, regardless of profit,
so I'm no longer sure.

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