Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Henri Sivonen <hsivonen AT iki.fi>]

On Aug 10, 2006, at 23:03, Evan Prodromou wrote:

> Again, I'll contrast to Free Software applications running on  
> proprietary operating systems. If the GPL had forbidden running or  
> developing a Free app on a propriety OS, there would be no Free  
> Software today.

When the GNU Project started, they had to bootstrap on proprietary  
systems. When CC started there were--and still are--plenty of media  
players around that don't require technical protection measures in  
the mass-distributed data.

For example, you can distribute DRMless files to iPod users. They put  
the files in the one-way iPod cage on their own. The distributor is  
not required to apply FairPlay. So the popularity of iPod is no  
reason for allowing DRM in *distribution*.

I believe that PSP will also happily play DRMless MPEG-4 movies and  
display DRMless JPEG images. Please correct me if I am wrong. All in  
all, console games that require signing by the platform vendor are a  
fringe case when you consider the whole Free Culture spectrum.

Besides, for a game to be Free, you have to be allowed to make  
modifications and run your modified version. If the ability to run  
your modified version requires you to go beg for signing by Sony, de  
facto the arrangement in non-Free as a whole and fails the Desert  
Island test.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen AT iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/