Development of Creative Commons licenses

[phyllostachys nuda <phnuda AT yahoo.com>]

Just because someone made a dumb rule a long time ago is no reason to abandon all rules and restrictions. Just as the GPL makes restrictions on those who 'limit freedom', again the interpretation of what 'limits freedom' is up to a lot of different interpretations. That doesn't make the GPL worthless. At one point, the FSF had a boycott of Apple and did not produce software for Apple; I believe this was an attempt to protest against Apple's position on patents. The FSF later abandoned this boycott. They did not, however, throw away the GPL or the principles that the GPL is supposed to help preserve.

 

You can not escape interpretation, it is merely a way that some people try to circumvent the rules made by others. But that doesn't mean you just give up. It means you start simple and work through the murky details one by one. That is what being a civilized society means.

 

Furthermore, 'user interpretation' is not the issue here, as this is not the equivalent of the Postal Service delivering mail. The primary person who gets to decide what is appropriate and inappropriate is the person who creates the work that is under a human rights-type of license. The user is supposed to abide by those rules. The users of the license are the ones who may come under legal scrutiny from the creators of the work they are using. Not the other way around.

 

 

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: human rights license (Jonathon Blake)


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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 06:06:49 +0000
From: Jonathon Blake
Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] human rights license
To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts

Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

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

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