Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Doug,
I get it. And I don't think it's CC's fault, really.
I don't think the seqence is

License->Works->Project

I think its more like:

Project->License->Works.

i.e. I don't think the license by itself will create
the sort of repository of images, photos, and audio
that someone can go to for whatever they might be
doing.

I think someone comes up with an idea for a project,
the license enables all works to be compatible with
one another, and then people create the works.

I get that all the metadata, hyper-tagging, super
searching, is intended to get around this, by letting
Alice put a single photo up under CC-BY and Bob
can find it via super-google for a completely unrelated
project, but I don't think it's there yet, and I'm not sure
its a technical issue. I don't think it gives people
the focus they need to know in what direction they
are being asked to contribute.

Wikipedia is a directed project that also happens to
work well for incremental additions, and separate
articles encourage even minor contributions. and
the whole thing scales unbelievably easily because
people simply go to the articles they're interested
in and contribute.

I've yet to see a media creation site that is CC-SA
that has the short term goal that allows people
to see some immediate results and has a long term
goal that inspires people to contribute. The other
issue is it needs to be "chunk-able". small contributions
need to be enabled somehow, and I don't know that
anyone's figured out how to do that.

And media and any other sort of "art" seems to be
a lot bloody harder to do than the pure funcationality
of a project like Linux or a more fact-oriented project
like wikipedia. I was at a fiction-writer's conference
once and a commercial publisher in a discussion panel
said "Your first half million words are practice".
That doesn't enable minor contributions from a large
body of people. That limits the contributing population
and therefore requires a lot more work from each individual.

These are problems that need to be solved before
you'll be able to have a site of music, images,
video, and text, that you can roll into your video.

And none of them are solvable by a license.
This problem is like a door with
about six locks on it, and when CC created
their spectrum of licenses, it unlocked one
of the locks. But that key doesn't fit the other
locks.





>     I thought I might remove all the copywrited stuff add CC music and
> pictures and put it on line free under CC.  I am finding it almost
> impossible to find stuff that I can use because so many pictures film
> clips and music have different conditions for use.   I also have not
> been able to figure out if it's ok to give credit on a separate page
> at the end of the cd. I am beginning to think that CC is not practical
> for use in something like I am trying to do. Seems like there should
> be a different search engine for each different type of license. If
> not yet down the road someplace.

-- 
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