Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

There were some attempts to to this with some of the early
open source licenses back in the day before GNU became the
defacto license. The problem becomes one of license incompatibility
as this is yet another license fork, making it incompatible
with any other license.

One of the things about copyleft is that it requires that
the person modifying the code and distributing it license
the new version under exactly the same license as the original
one. This means that a GNU-GPL license that prohibits
"unethical use" will be forever incompatible with a
GNU-GPL license that allows it, therefore the works under
those two licenses will never be able to mix. ever.

One of the things that copyleft and gift-economy licenses
have going for them is patience, free software wins in the
long run. The thing is that the "long run" means that what
was once considered unethical, may be considered normal a
decade later. Prior licenses attempted to specifically
exclude certain nations from using their work, but leaders
change, and then you're stuck with a work that can never
be used by that nation. They also attempted to restrict
use of the work to exclude certain areas of technology,
such as nuclear power. But what was considered dangerous
or unethical today may be considered life-saving a decade
from now.

This attempt to use a license to restrict a piece of software
from being used by certain persons or groups or certain
fields of endeavor that license incompatibility became a
serious issue. The open source definition decided that the
best answer for the gift economy, for the work itself, was
to put an end to such license restrictions.

http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

If there is a nation that you believe is immoral or a
field of endeavor that you believe is immoral, there are
much more direct and effective ways to try and address
those issues than to saddle a community project with
what would effectively be a permanent restriction that
would forever be incompatible with any other variation
of license.



>   Hello.
>
>   I have been wishing for a license for software that prohibits unethical
> use of that software. More specifically, it is my opinion that software,
> especially when linked to biotech and nanotech, will be more dangerous
> than atomic weapons. However I also believe that this time around, the
> creators may be able to get control of their creations, rather than
> militaries and governments, by using copyright law, which has an extreme
> amount of power behind it owing to the large multinational corporation's
> whose dependence exists upon this law being upheld.
>
>   The license I am looking for goes something like this: It is a viral
> license like any generic free license, except that it prohibits use of
> the software for 'violations of human rights, privacy, freedom of
> speech, etc'.
>
>   In this way I believe that corporations and governments that use these
> tools to control, exploit, discriminate, and abuse their populations
> will be suable under copyright law. Other corporations will have to back
> this on principle because they depend on the validity of copyright law
> in the courts. Legally, if someone uses the software to, say, illegally
> spy on citizens, then that someone is going to be breaking copyright
> law. Nobody has to fight about right, wrong, etc. It's just a matter of
> property law.
>
>   The only problem comes with governents that use 'eminent domain' to take
> code, or simply outright steal it. Or countries that don't care about
> copyright law.
>
>   Thus some brilliant new technology that could wipe out the entire planet
> should not be trusted in the hands of any human being, and so should not
> be invented until we are spiritually evolved enough to handle it.
>
>   But a lot of things, say, web services or compression or database code,
> these things are in a different category. They could be used for evil
> but they aren't designed specifically for it. We need them but we might
> weild a little control over their use with a proper license.
>
>   Thanks.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
>  Yahoo! Music Unlimited - Access over 1 million songs. Try it
> free._______________________________________________
> cc-licenses mailing list
> cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
>


-- 
Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws
http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/