Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Fri, 2006-11-08 at 14:10 +0200, Paul Keller wrote:

> frankly speaking i think it is a more or less  
> obscure discussion that deals with scenarios that constitute a tiny  
> minority of the re-uses on would expect for a CC licensed work (this  
> might off course change if TPM enabled/requiring platforms become  
> more widespread, but i dont think we should engage in preemptive  
> compliance here).

I don't think this is preemptive. There are millions of people who have
game consoles, text readers, and music players that require some sort of
DRM. And even if it's just one person who can't use a work on one piece
of hardware, it's still wrong.

> in any case i do not think (and that judgment was  
> shared by a number of other project leads) that these fringe  
> scenarios are a good reason to make the licenses more complicated (if  
> we focus on anything that should be making them less complicated).

We live in a complicated world with complicated legal regimes. The
current licenses are mostly unreadable except by lawyers and Free
Culture geeks. Leaving out 40-50 words isn't going to change that.

However, I have to ask: if the text was less complicated than the one
Mia attached, would that lower your resistance to the idea at all?
What's your threshold for the length of additional clauses? 30 words? 20
words? 0 words?

> (3) if downstream users are forced to do so (by distributing it via  
> the PSP for example) they can request an extra permission. i guess  
> most licensors would be more than happy to grant this permission.

If most licensors are happy to grant the permission, why don't we save
everyone some hassle and put it in the license in the first place?

If we're trying to uncomplicate the process, I think adding 20-30 words
to an already very long document is a lot less complicated than
requiring licensees to track down licensors and ask permission for what
most licensors would agree to anyways.

> i do not see what is wrong with this approach.

I'll throw out some scenarios: the licensor is dead. The licensor is
anonymous or pseudonymous. There are so many copyright holders (e.g.,
for a film or for a wiki) that tracking down the licensors to get
separate permission from each one is an excessive burden. Licensor and
licensee have to draw up some separate legal papers to document the
permission, costing them time and money.

Compared to adding a clause to the license, requiring additional
permission is really a pain.

> as long as scenarios like the PSP scenario are  
> exceptions i do not see the need to change the licenses.

There have been more than 5 million PSPs sold in North America alone. Is
that really an "exception"?

~Evan