Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

If Alice and Bob both hold copyright on some work
(the wrote a novel together, for example),
then any derivative of that novel must get
Alice and Bob's permission. Both.

Assigning copyright to all humanity
would be rather like having Alice,
Bob, and the entire alphabet soup
holding copyright on a work, and
would require everyone's permission
to create a derivative work.

This is unlike Public Domain which
requires No One's permission to create
a derivative work.

You can see "all of humanity" at work in something
such as Linux, which is a rather massive collective
work. Not all of humanity, but rather close.
Linux acquires copyright "inertia" with every
person who contributes to the project. And by
inertia I mean that you have another person whose
permission you would need before changing the
GPL license to something that doesn't qualify as
GPL version N+1.

This is part of why adding new licenses to CC
is problematic: because new licenses may not be
backward compatible, and to upgrade an old license
to a different CC license would require everyone's
permission, which is hard to accomplish.

If you could assign copyright to
All of Humanity
somehow, I think it would mean that you
would need a few billion signatures to
change the license or create a derivative
of that work.

I could be mistaken, though.
I am not a lawyer.
This is not legal advice.

Greg London

-- 
Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws
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