Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> derivatives such as translations or abstracts
> for a work under a no-deriv license can be made
> provided you get the permission of the
> author/copyright holder beforehand.

That is correct. But I was talking about the worst
case scenario of a combination of using a CC-ND
license and requiring contributers assign copyright
to one central person, in this case, Phil.

Phil has created a situation where everyoen must
trust him to do what's best for the work and
best for the Public. If Phil betrays that trust
and sells the right to modify the work to XYZ Corp,
then XYZ Corp is probably buying the rights because
they would be exclusive rights, which means they
wouldn't want Phil to sell them the exclusive right
to modify the work, then turn around and grant the
public, or individuals in the public, the right to
modify the work. They might even purchase all rights
from Phil so that he no longer has the right to do
anything with the work and the public is left with
the only legally, publicly available version of the
work being CC-ND and no one to grant permission to
make even slight modifications.

So, yes, you can get permission, but in the scenario
of CC-ND plus a copyright assignment for a project
being advertised as "shared" and "freedom", the public
has to trust the copyright holder. And worst case
scenario, if that person betrays that trust, the
public and the people who made all those contributions
are totally and completely screwed.

Compare this with assigning copyright and licensing
the work CC-SA or GNU-GPL. Worst case scenario,
if the copyright holder betrays the public trust,
the public still has a copyleft licensed version
of the work that they can continue to use and improve.

Greg

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