Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> http://x.narya.net/static/terry/cc_colors.png
> http://x.narya.net/static/terry/cc_colors.svg

> 4) The colors are the scheme I originally proposed, of course.

That copyleft is on the far left and
public domain is in the middle is
a bit of an issue for me.

>From a legal rights point of view,
a spectrum would have
public domain at zero,
copyleft at 1 and
copyright at 2.

public domain retains zero rights.
Copyleft retains some rights.
copyright retains all rights.

>From a "freedom" point of view,
you get into the battle of
copyleft versus bsd, and since
both licenses are still around,
I think it's safe to say that
that question hasn't been resolved
as far as the community is concerned.

A number of project have chosen
the BSD license and some individuals
use nothing more than the CC-BY
license, and they are legitimate
choices.

this also ignores the basic fact that
all works eventually fall into the
public domain when copyright expires.
This is the entire basis for copyright
law in the US, as far as Promoting
arts and useful sciences goes.
Someone creates something new, they
get exclusive rights for a while,
and then it becomes public domain.

Putting copyleft further left of
public domain would seem to suggest
that copyright works should enter
the copyleft domain when their rights
expire, which would be a horrible
result.

It's confusing from representing
the legal rights poitn of view,
it takes side in the copyleft-vs-bsd
battle, and it basically says copyright
as a basic idea is flawed, that the
end goal should be nothing but copyleft
works.

I hope that CC chooses to represent
the spectrum of rights based on the
legal facts of the different licences,
educates folks as to the differences,
and then lets people choose whatever
license works for them.

-- 
Barbara Bauer makes SFWA's 20 Worst Literary Agencies list
http://www.sfwa.org/beware/twentyworst.html