Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 16:04 -0700, peter wrote:

> I read an article on slashdot.org by one John Dvorak (link 1) the 
> discussion sparked on the slashdot forums (link 2) peaked my interest. 

ITYM "piqued". For future reference.

> But suppose in some iteration of our infinite 
> series of re-use someone wants to publish a derivate of the original 
> work for profit.  How would someone go about contacting the author for 
> such a purpose?

How does the punchline of the joke go...? "Don't do that, then."?

Seriously, such a person is screwed. The CCPL licenses all require
attribution be preserved (name, responsibility for the work, a
copyright-related URL, etc.) but even so, just having someone's name
doesn't mean that they can be contacted, nor does it mean that they'd
agree to licensing the work. 

Then again, there's no guarantee of that in proprietary works, either.
Another example is a full-length movie, with music, writing,
cinematography, publicity and privacy rights of the actors, etc., etc. 

The comic strips on creativecommons.org burble about how great the NC
licenses are, and how licensors "just" have to contact the copyright
holder if they want to do something disallowed by the license.

It is unfortunate, but it is not all that Creative Commons is about.
Works licensed under the Attribution- or Attribution-ShareAlike licenses
would not suffer the defect you describe.

>   Also given the rather complex parentage of any 
> derivative work, wouldn't it be prohibitively expensive to license a 
> Creative Commons work (I'm assuming free distribution for non-commercial 
> purposes, but that the license requires the permission for commercial) 
> for commercial use?

NonConmmercial- and NoDerivatives-licensed works are the crippleware of
the content world. Don't look for long-term thinking in them, because
there is none.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan AT bad.dynu.ca

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