Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

>> I don't know if this is relevant, but
>> please see "Argumentum ad lazarum"
>> http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#lazarum
>>
>> Money is not inherently evil, so prohibiting it
>> doesn't actually solve any problem.
>
> Your points have weight, but see my post on the love song.

Well, I was talking about what licenses allow
a Free As In Speech project to be successful.
Rampantly successful, outrageously successful,
in a "holy crap, a million new people started
using my work today" sort of way.

In that sense, imagine a bell curve on a graph.
On the left is Public Domain. On the right is
All Rights Reserved. The vertical axis reflects
how much the license is designed to allow a
Free project to be successful.

The peak of the bell curve is the ideal spot.
It is located at a point where the license:

(1) allows the work to be used for anything,
by anything, to do anything, used by anyone,
contributed by anyone, derived by anyone, etc,

(2) it somehow protects the works from
proprietary competition.

Well, (1) is describing Public Domain, where the
work has no copyright restrictions at all.
And (2) is describing copyleft/sharealike which
prevents proprietary forking. Note that (2) does
not prevent commercial uses, it prevents proprietary
forking. It prevents Microsoft from creating a
derivative that is better than the publicly available
version and licensing it All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft can make a derived version, they can
sell it for gobs of money, but that derived work
then becomes freely available like the original
work so that the people contributing to the
Gift Economy can use it and keep up with Microsoft
rather than getting left in the dust.

That is the peak of the bell curve. That is the
point on the graph where a license most empowers
a Gift Economy project to succeed. And as it happens,
that point is a pure copyleft/sharealike license
with no other restrictions added.

If you are up to empower some Gift Economy project
that can compete with Microsoft or the RIAA or
the MPAA, then that project is going to need all
the help they can get, and a pure copyleft/sharealike
license is the only way to go. Any restrictions will
simply hinder its success.

So, you have teh right to put your love song under
a CC-NC license, but do not think that you are
enabling a major Gift Economy to use that love song
in the way they need to use it to survive.

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