Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> The FSF take copyright assignment but they license
> their assignments under a copyleft license.

And in doing so, they can call the project Free.
Here's the important difference. FSF requires
you assign copyright to them, so they become a
"Trustworthy Trent" in the process. But they
take the contributions and put them under copyleft.

So, if FSF were to betray the work, if they were
to do something that was for their benefit
and for the detriment of the work/project,
anyone could step in, take the work under copyleft
and do a content fork under the copyleft license.

Phil here has the work under CC-ND,
and requires people submit their contributions
and assign copyright to him, which Phil then
releases under CC-ND.

Phil has become a Trustworthy Trent in this scenario.

If, HYPOTHETICALLY, sometime down the road,
Phil betrays his position of trust and does
something to the project that is for his
benefit at the expense of the work itself,
then NO-ONE can step in and save the work.

The public only has access to a CC-NODERIVATIVES
work. If Phil were to betray the work, no one
can perform a fork of the project.

So, while FSF requires copyright assignment,
they commit to a copyleft license, which means
the worst they can do is cause a fork in the
project, where FSF has one version and someone
else has another version, AND BOTH VERSIONS
ARE LICENSED COPYLEFT.

Phil on the other hand, has not committed to
a copyleft license, which means the worst case
HYPOTHETICAL scenario is that he takes his
version of the project and sells a copy to
some corporate interest. Meanwhile all the
contributers are left with is a CC-ND version
which can never be modified again.

Does anyone else see the major difference here?

One results in a content fork and you get two copyleft projects.
Both versions can continue modifications, continue adding to
the project.

The other results in complete end of all modifications to the
publicly available version, and Phil gets to sell the project
to MajorCorp, who ends  up with the only rights to modify the work.

So, it isn't the assigning of copyright that is the problem.
It's assigning copyright coupled with a CC-NoDerivatives license
that is the problem.

If FSF betrays their position of trust,
the public still has a Free/Copyleft work.

If Phil betrays his position of trust,
the public has a CC-ND work
that they can never modify again.

And apparently, Phil takes all this talk of
hypothetical situations about what he COULD do
as an assault on his character. So I tried to
clarify that I am not suggesting that he WILL
do something, only that HYPOTHETICALLY,
if he did to some act, this is what the results
would be.



-- 
Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws
http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/