Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Jonathon Blake <jonathon.blake AT gmail.com>]

On 12/1/05, phyllostachys nuda wrote:

>: Anyone can decide a starting set of rules.

I realize I'm coming into this pretty late.

I'm going to take one real world example.

  US Postal regulations prohibit the sending of obscene and
pornographic material.
The case law permits the USPS to define all from a specific address to
a specific address as being "obscene" and "pornographic".

The recipient of the mail is the person who gets to define "obscene"
and "pornographic".

Which is why Reader's Digest Corporation and Walt Disney are amongst
the companies that have fallen afoul of that specific statute.

When Congress passed that statute about the post office not delivering
obscene and pornographic material, they did not have the Bible, Bambi,
or Reader's Digest magazine in mind, as being examples of
"pornography".

Once end-users [mail recipients] discovered that they could define
those terms, and use any criteria that they wanted to, to define those
terms, it was simply a matter of time before those companies ran into
the "obscene and pornography" statute.

That example of the unintended consequences of "user choice" is one
example of why licences with "ethical" clauses are a bad idea.

xan

jonathon
--
This is our sandbox and if we want to throw sand we can