Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Tuesday 19 July 2005 10:41 pm, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> 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.

Attribution probably not, but Attribution-ShareAlike does have similar issues 
for certain uses as I understand it. Of course, you may consider this a 
feature where some would consider it a bug. 
>
> >   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.

Bam Sookie! You have hit the nail on the head with this comment Evan (as far 
as I am concerned.) I think that if you are concerned with keeping the 
commons common, then BY-SA is the game to play when you come to the CC arena.
>
> ~Evan

all the best,

drew
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