Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <teloscorbin AT gmail.com>]

> > because the copy isn't much good
> > if the only way to play it, read it, use
> > it, is through a PS2
> > or an iPod or some other DRM'ed hardware.
>
> Unless you modify it to work on another platform. Porting between encoding
> systems and platforms is not an insuperable barrier and is fairly
> commonplace. Especially for creative works that may be incorporated into a
> game (images, video, music, text), it may be quite easy.

But Creative Commons doesn't require source code,
or has that changed? If I have an executable for PS2
and make a non-DRM version available, and if making
a PS2 emulator for my PC is illegal because of DMCA,
then I really have no other way to play it, do I?



> > Yes, it woudl be nice if Alice could play Bob's
> > game on her PS2, but if Charlie doesn't have a
> > PS2, and the DMCA prevents him from running
> > a PS2 simulator on his PC, then this is little
> > different than allowing proprietary forks for oddball
> > cases.
>
> I think it's extremely different. If there is a cleartext copy, downstream
> users can modify and extract parts of the program for their own needs, or
> port it to another platform. It's not an optimal situation, but there
> doesn't seem to be a lot of choice for satisfying the needs of both
> developers and users.

Cleartext meaning source code?
Apparently I've been out of the loop for a bit.
If CC licenses require source code, then
the DRM-free copy may be workable, but
if it's an executable, or something equally
opaque, then there's a problem.

> Letting people make their own accommodations with the increasingly DRM'd
> world means we will see Free Content on more platforms, not less. Turning up
> our nose and saying that our content is too good for DRM'd platforms won't
> stop DRM; it'll just impede the distribution of Free Content.
>
> I don't like DRM. I think it sucks. But license provisions are the wrong
> place to fight it.

I don't think I have *ever* advocated using a license to play political
games. I advocate a license such as CC-SA for gift economy
projects because it is *BETTER* for the project, not because it
fulfills on some secret agenda of my own. So you don't have to worry
if I'm "fighting DRM" here. I'm not.

If the SA license is worded such that it handicaps the gift economy
that adopted it, I'm against it. If it is worded in such a way that the
work created by the gift economy can be exploited by some loophole
such as DRM, and effectively locking the comunity out of following the
derivatives that were taken into that loophole, then I'm against it.

If it is worded in such a way that there is no loophole that gives someone
a substantial advantage over teh gift economy, then I'll support it.

The way I see it, people who need ShareAlike need it because
they have proprietary competition, so a public domain
license isn't feasible. They don't want to allow someone to use the work
to create a proprietary fork and compete against the free version of the
work. So, if someone needs this protection and chose SA to get that
protection, I don't want the license to leave a backdoor open that will
let someone circumvent that protection.

But I haven't quite figured out how the license works yet around DRM,
because I haven't really pondered all the ways DRM could provide loopholes
that could be exploited against the community that created the original
work. Rob mentioned a way that I hadn't thought of, so I raised it again.

I am simply looking for possible backdoors and loopholes that would
allow someone to circumvent the protection that people who chose
ShareAlike expect.