Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Erik Moeller" <eloquence AT gmail.com>]

On 6/9/06, Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com> wrote:

> Very nice effort, BTW. I covered your startup in the
> current LinuxUser & Developer (#62, coincidentally, I
> received your PR right before I had to send off the
> news, so I snuck it in at the last minute).

Thanks! :-)

> Well, I prefer for there to be a distinction, because it matters to some
> people.

Sure, but it *shouldn't* matter. It's unnecessary infighting among
groups that fundamentally share very similar values. I say that as a
person who made the transition from favoring copyleft to favoring
public domain, and who has argued both sides of the fence. But again,
that is of course a political stance, and given that I think it's
silly to fight about it, I won't get into a big argument about whether
they should have different colors either. :-)

> Likewise, an argument could be made that both NC and ND should be
> yellow, instead of having an orange at all, but I thought it's nice to
> have some distinction (but yellow and orange have very similar psychological
> impact).  Personally, I find ND less threatening than NC, because I don't
> feel like it's "pretending to be free" -- the artist surely knows they
> aren't
> promoting any kind of commons with an ND work.  But the ND is both
> less 'free' and less 'commons-friendly' than NC, IMHO.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "commons-friendly". The problem
with NC is that it causes incompatibility with works under more
permissive licenses -- it promotes an isolated NC pseudocommons.
Fortunately, through some recent talks, I've been getting the feeling
that the free content ideology is catching on, especially in academia.

> "1"     -- single CPU limitations and other things that prevent you from
>              having backup copies, etc.  Can't burn songs to CD, etc.

I think this doesn't work at all - it's neither intuitive nor
cool-looking. My first guess was that it had something to do with copy
prevention flags (1/0). Perhaps, if you want a no-backup symbol,
something like a "no rescue kit" logo would work.

Erik