Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Fri, 2006-14-04 at 05:21 -0700, Max Brown wrote:
>     Who know "Against DRM 1.0"? It's a free copyleft license for artworks.
At least from Debian's point of view, it's not Free as in Freedom. Keeping me from porting to certain platforms makes it not Free to use.
>     The second clause prevents the use of DRM to protect the work: if licensor uses DRM, the license is not applicable to the work (on the contrary, CCPL licensor can use DRM);
That's not true. See section 4a of Attribution 2.5 (although this has been in all versions so far):
>     You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.
This is one of the reasons that Debian doesn't allow CC-licensed content:
>     http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary
>     if licensee uses DRM, license is automatically void (on the contrary, CCPL licensee can use DRM in a manner not inconsistent with the terms of the license).
So, even if a technology is consistent with the terms of the license, and lets the user exercise all the rights in the license, the license still wouldn't allow it? That's just stupid. And the definition of DRM is a really poor one: "acts which are authorised or not authorised by licensor" is, logically, any act.

This anti-DRM clause restricts the licensee's ability to port to platforms where DRM is required. I can't use an image under this license in many PDA bookreader platforms, nor in console systems like the Playstation.

A much better scheme (I think) is parallel distribution: licensee can use DRM, if they make an unrestricted version available, too. That way, creative folk can experiment with DRM'd platforms, but the recipients of the work can still exercise their freedoms to distribute and modify the work.

If you think that the Playstation market is going to dry up from lack of Open Content images and music, well, think again, and a little harder this time. Maybe, instead, Open Content will benefit from being available on DRM platforms.

In summary: this is a dumb license.

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>

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