Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> I think that with the right agreements in place,
> you could design a setup where the docs behaved
> like BY-SA on wiki and BY-ND off wiki

You cannot put CC-SA on a work, while limiting that
work to a particular website. so this is no longer
"like BY-SA" or like "Shareing" in any sense of the word.

The only way to achieve this would be to distribute
the work CC-ND and have a wiki set up that accepts
contributions under an agreement that contributers
assign copyright to Phil.

At this point, Phil may as well distribute the works
All Rights Reserved and have a website that accepts
contributions. He's only about half an inch from
that point as it is. In the color spectrum,
All Rights Reserved was red and CC-ND was orange,
the two colors abutted each other.

Most importantly, and it seems that this point
keeps getting forgotten, the idea of required
notification of modifications being sent to the
original author was suggested long ago in software
circles and shot down specifically
because it is too much baggage. So EVEN IF the
work behaves like sharealike, and EVEN IF Phil
acts as noble shepard protecting the work,
Phil has stil implemented a system that has already
been rejected by the software community as not Free.

He can do it that way if he wishes. If he's got
the rights to the original works, he can do whatever
he wants. But don't expect anyone from the FLOSS
community to bend over and say
"Yeah, Phil, great Free project you got there"

Rather, anyone from the FLOSS community should
be chanting the mantra:
"It aint Free unless the license is Free."

I could set up a project where the work is
All Rights Reserved and anyone could go to
my website to read the works. And I could
accept contributions but require people
assign copyright to me. But I can't call it
Free, nor say it has anything to do with
freedom, nor call it Sharing, or any of that.

It aint Free unless the license is Free.

I could have my All Rights Reserved project
set up so people can use it, read it, and
play with it, and argue that they must
send modifications through me because only
I the great maintainer of the work can be
trusted to defend the true freedom of the work.

And if I did that, someone from the FLOSS
community better damn well be telling me
I'm full of it.

Bill Gates just released some sort of tool
that allows people to mark their documents
with CC licenses. He distributed this tool
with an EULA that not only witholds certain
rights of copyright, but extends the agreement
to force the user to agree not to do things
outside of copyright, such as reverse engineer
the tool. But ol' Bill is offering this tool
with a "trust me" look on his face. But I'd
tell anyone to avoid his tool and just do the
cut and paste yourself.

It ain't Free unless the license is Free.

Phil can do whatever he wants with works
he owns the copyrights to, but anyone in
the FLOSS community should be calling it
what it is: not-Free, not-Sharing.



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