Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

(I am not a lawyer. I am not Creative Commons.)

On 31 Jul 2005, at 10:25, Johannes Kroll wrote:

> I have a general question regarding CC licenses. There's no license
> available that restricts distribution of a CC'ed work by criteria  
> other
> than "commercial/non-commercial", right?

The Sampling licenses forbid use of the work in advertising. And the  
No-Derivatives licenses forbid use of the work as part of a new work.

> Say, if I write a text and I
> don't want it to be used by a right-wing party for propaganda. Or,  
> say,
> I don't want my music to be used as "hold music" on the telephone  
> or in
> the lift. :p

The main CC licenses do not restrict use of the work by ideological  
context. It would be very difficult to do so, and people would always  
find loopholes.

The FSF have an interesting blog entry on using licenses to oppose  
political or social uses of work that the licensor finds objectionable:

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050211.html

How similar cultural work is to software for this purpose is debatable.

> You can't make a CC license for each and every case, right?... So,  
> what
> I'd then want is that people need to ask me before they use my stuff,
> regardless if it's for commercial purposes or not. Would I want plain
> (C) Copyright then?

Yes, I think so. Or you could release your work Non-commercial, which  
would probably prevent the work's use as lift music, and No- 
derivatives, which would probably prevent its use in propaganda (I  
think).

If you are in a jurisdiction with strong "moral rights" (such as  
Germany or France), you *might* be able to use those moral rights to  
object to misattribution or mistreatment of licensed work. But this  
is an untested idea with the licenses.

The problem with any solution of this kind is that the propagandists  
or the lift operators can use it to prevent you criticising them as  
well. It might be better to allow them to "mis-use" your work and  
then "mis-use" their work in turn to criticise them as part of  
ongoing public discourse (using a share-alike license).

- Rob.