Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Tuesday 07 March 2006 09:22 am, Greg London wrote:
> >> 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.

Don't get me wrong, I like pure copyleft licenses for just about everything. 
I 
just think that it is a mistake to say that the licences mentioned are absurd 
and one would be a fool to want to release under such a licence.  One may be 
a fool to think releasing under such a licence will gain as much support as 
releasing under a pure copyleft licence, but one may have other objectives.

I merely tried to point out one such possibility.
>
> 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.

If I were to choose such a licence, I would certainly not expect the kind of 
support to develop that might under a more encouraging licence.
>
> Greg

all the best,

drew

ps. always good to go back and forth with you Greg.
-- 
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/145261
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