Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Sunday 25 June 2006 09:31 am, Greg London wrote:
> > 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.

What if, instead of an assignment, there was a grant. Something like Bruce 
does over at technocrat.net:

"Copyright
Unless we negotiate some other agreement: You retain the copyright on 
anything 
you write here, and can do what you wish with it. You grant to Perens LLC a 
separate and independent copyright on the same work. Either of us can do what 
we wish with it. We may use that copyright to make your work available to 
others under a "Free" license."

as seen here:

http://technocrat.net/d/2006/3/2/1069

IIRC, this should give him everthing he claims is needed without giving the 
ability to sell exclusive rights. Combined with the other things I have 
discussed, why could this not be done? (Again, excepting the privacy issues 
and again, I am not by any means proposing that this should be done.)
>
> 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

all the best,

drew
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