Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Ron Kaminsky <kam AT orbotech.com>]

(I hope this will thread properly - it's a test of Thunderbird
at the same time; sorry if it/I fail)

On Wednesday 13 July 2005 05:35 pm, J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote:

> Also, you would want your estate to somehow recover the money spent
> on this arrangement if there was no copyright on the work when your
> estate went to get their copy of the work. After all, if the work is
> no longer under copyright, your estate needs no permission to do
> anything with the work. Hence, paying for that permission was a
> total waste of money.

Yes, you have a point --- on the face of it, (1) is superfluous
since the copyright will expire. Unfortunately, given the current
way things are going, no one is sure _when_ it will expire. Having
an explicit date would enable a third-party preservation agent
to have a "guaranteed date of release", otherwise its costs are
open-ended.

On Wed Jul 13 19:11:46 EDT 2005 drew Roberts wrote:

> I think you are missing what is concerns are and what he wants to
> do.

> He is concerned that when copyright on the work runs out, there will
> be no copies of the work in existance anywhere.

Yes, and I am also concerned that the preservation process might be
legislated out of existence during the period until the release date.

> He wants th right to make copies now in order to ensure the
> existance of such copies when copytights to run out on the work.

> I think I have that right.

Yes, I believe we currently have that right. In most countries. But as
Carole King ponders "will you still love me tomorrow" --- there is no
guarantee that that particular fair-use right will be not be
legislated away during the preservation period.

I've heard that in the UK it is illegal now to copy a DVD even for
one's own personal use. Even *with* fair use, AFAIK you do _not_ have
the right to transfer your copy to a third-party preservation agent.
And given the long term of copyright, most people would need to use
such an agent (is it legal to transfer your fair-use copies to your
estate? It wouldn't matter if the "first sale" media was still
available and technically readable, but we're talking about
preservation, here).

Another stumbling block to preservation (in the US) is the DMCA, which
explicitly forbids a third-party preservation agent from unprotecting
DRM protected works. (Can even an artist's explicit license get around
this?) It's unlikely that a work with unbroken DRM will be usable when
its copyright expires, unless steps are taken during its _commercially
viable life_ to preserve it, and unprotecting it is the first step.

If I want to preserve a work, I would greatly prefer to be able to
rely on a license granted to me (which would appear to a non-lawyer
type like me to resemble a contract), since I would suspect that
legislation which would retroactively revoke an explicit license
granted to me might not even be constitutional (or unenforceable for
some other reason). I would assume any third-party preservation agents
would be even more interested in an explicit license.

An additional reason which might make such a license interesting is
that I rather doubt any large commercial content provider is going to
agree to give you any such license on any work, and then it is
possible to advertise that "company X doesn't think it's worth $N to
preserve work Y". Although if it already isn't clear to someone how
selfish and petty most of these content providers are, I'm not sure
that will help.

Ron