Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> Do you know the name of your friends machine? Sounds interesting.
> $5000 might be a decent investment if it does do some interesting
> stuff.

She can download a lace pattern, it creates the lace on a
sheet of weird plastic (to hold the thread in place), and
then when it's done, she soaks the plastic in water and it
disintegrates, leaving nothing but the lace.

She was sewing a bunch of 8 inch lace discs using the machine
and then she was stitching them together by hand to make a
big table cloth. The lace patterns are whatever you can
program up in your computer. the tablecloth she was working
on was unbelievable.

> You're right, real-world applications are harder to create commons
> for, but I'm just not sure I understand the efforts to keep fashion
> "secret". Top design houses are getting ripped off anyway. I keep
> thinking that the commons license will allow me to enhance the
> importance of my "originals". something i read about MP3s makes sense
> to me. The more downloaded an artist was, the more CDs they sold. I'd
> like to think this is a behavior that is shared across many fields.
> Imagine if The Gap released patterns! That would make news!

I don't think its any sort of conspiracy or short-sightedness
going on. I think that as soon as you get into physical stuff,
then two things suddenly go against you. First it suddenly
costs downstream people money to actually implement your
electronic design. I think contributers get their incentive
from how much people benefit from their works. If I write software
or text and put it on the web, everyone can benefit from it
immediately. If I design some clothes, then the only people
who benefit are the ones who spend the money to create the piece.

The other thing is that middlemen can't just pay for bandwidth
and pass along the work as a direct benefit and pay for it with
advertising or whatever. wikipedia is getting rehosted by sites
that put in advertising to make some money. resellers like that
for clothing would have to spend money to make the clothes before
they could sell them.

I'm an electrical engineer, and I think that's pretty much
why open source hardware is no where near as widespread as
open source software. It costs money to build boards, whereas
a company like redhat can take linux, and bundle it with
support. A company that does hosting can take linux and
use it directly to host websites. You can't take a USB
design and "use" it for free. You have to put it in an
ASIC or FPGA and that costs money. non-technical people can
buy a computer and can usually muddle their way through
to install linux. Not many would take on soldering boards
with surface mount components and debugging with logic
probes and oscilliscopes.

Same goes for clothing, I think. there's all the additional
equipment needed to put it into reality. For linux geeks,
all you need is a computer, and linux geeks already had one,
so it was a sunk cost, so working on linux didn't really
cost anything. For a sewing geek, they're not always
computer savvy, and a computer and software is extra money.
My friend with the fancy sewing machine is "OK" with
computers, but she isn't a "geek".

> I'm sure most the the folks on this list don't bother with fashion
> trends and frankly neither do I much even though I'm in the industry.
> At the moment, there seems to be a growing trend for craft and ethnic.
> Not sure if it's a rejection of mass-produced culture or just an
> extention of "reality" fads. But this folk aesthetic seems in line
> with CC. Now, don't get me wrong, most fashionistas will not make
> there own clothes but the trend for mixing something handmade with
> manufactured is on point. And if a commons for fashion is to take
> root, it will need a trend to latch onto.

I think somthing like fashion is mostly a commodity
market already, and the money to be made is from advertising
and branding which distinguishes your pair of jeans from
the competitors pair of jeans. If a fashion version of
RedHat came into being, it would need something that would
distinguish it from the fashion version of SUSE and all the
others. And I'm not sure how a company would do that.

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