Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Per I. Mathisen" <per AT leftist.net>]

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> AFAIK most distributions do not ship the package that contains the
> download script. If I am right, then presumably a commercial game
> company with the same or higher risk profile than a Linux distribution
> also would not ship code to download and use specific content they may
> not actually include due to license.

True. However, I am not so interested in "would" here, as in "could".

> By this argument copyright itself is illusory for anything posted
> online. This is a silly argument.  Sure, it is not possible to prevent
> individuals from downloading anything posted online, but it is possible
> to deter public uses. If it weren't ASCAP would collect no fees,
> theaters would pay nothing to movie studios, the FSF could not enforce
> the terms of the GPL, etc.

Yes, you can prevent public uses. So for many this is probably a
non-issue.

The thing is, if you control the distribution through copyright, you can
close access to those who exploit the availability of your content online,
like Microsoft did to their web fonts. This option is not there for NC
content (same goes for BY and SA of course but this is a feature there).
So despite what a lot of people seem to think, NC does not give a
watertight proof against commercial exploitation.

This "hole" becomes larger the more the personal computer is made to do,
which is the trend, and which will raise interesting questions of its own.

Eg is a "web radio" RSS feed that links to a NC music piece available
online for automatic loading from your private PC a public performance or
a private use? Eg a game company could allow people to download their game
as two downloads, one from an external server for the NC bits, and one
download from their server for the commercial bits.

  - Per