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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Version 3.0 - Public Discussion

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Greg London" <teloscorbin AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Version 3.0 - Public Discussion
  • Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:46:40 -0400

So, I sort of lost track of this.
Was there any sort of agreement about the DRM clause?

I'd be happy with if (1) this piece

"You [being the licensee, not the licensor] may not distribute,
publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the
Work with any technological measures that control access or use of
the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License
Agreement."

as long as it was specific to each instance of the work.
i.e. rather than requiring duplicate copies, have the
digital rights management actually MANAGE the RIGHTS,
meaning it would allow copying, distributing, and
creating derivative works, as long as the hardware
supported those features.

I also think (2) the license should add a bit that says
authorization is granted to circumvent any tpm
for all instances of the work, and all instances of
all derivatives of the work.

Then DRM can't be used to take a work private
or set someone up as sole source for DRM-versions
of works.

Was there any agreement on 1 and 2?
complete disagreement?
total chaos?
war?
?

Bueller?

Greg London
http://www.SomeRightsReserved.org


On 8/9/06, Mia Garlick <mia AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
# Public Discussion of Version 3.0 Launched:

As was mentioned a little while ago (http://lists.ibiblio.org/
pipermail/cc-licenses/2006-May/003557.html), we are looking to move
ahead with versioning the CC licenses up to version 3.0 to improve
the clarity of the terms of the licenses and to address some concerns
of one of our first and very prominent license adopters — MIT, with
their OpenCourseWare project (http://ocw.mit.edu/), and to also take
on board the concerns of the Debian group about the clarity of some
provisions of our licenses.

# New US and "generic" license

Another big feature of version 3.0 is that we will be spinning off
what has been called the "generic" license to now be the US license
and have crafted a new "generic" license that is based on the
language of international IP treaties and takes effect according to
the national implementation of those treaties. This may only be
something that gets IP lawyers excited but I thought it might be good
to share this draft with the community as well in order to ensure
full transparency and in case people were interested and/or had any
comments.

# Anti-DRM language - possible parallel distribution language

Finally, there has been much discussion - preparatory to releasing
these drafts to the public - about whether to amend the CC licenses
to include a "parallel distribution" amendment to the existing "anti-
DRM" (or more correctly an "anti-TPM" (technological protection
measures)) clause of the CC licenses. As you probably now, the
existing clause of the Creative Commons licenses states that:

"You [being the licensee, not the licensor] may not distribute,
publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the
Work with any technological measures that control access or use of
the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License
Agreement."

As you can see from the drafts below, version 3.0 includes amendments
designed to make this language clearer. But there are some in the
Debian community that feel that this renders the CC licenses
inconsistent with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (http://
www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines) (although the group has
deemed the FDL, which has similar if not stronger "anti-DRM" language
in it, DFSG-free http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060316) and that
if CC introduces parallel distribution language we could achieve both
freedom of content and freedom to code for open and closed systems
(see this discussion for an explanation of the reasoning behind
allowing TPMs on free content: http://evan.prodromou.name/
Free_content_and_DRM). The parallel distribution provision
essentially says that a licensee can apply a technological protection
measure to content only if they also release the content in an
unrestricted format.

However, our international affiliates (http://creativecommons.org/
worldwide), as well as others in our community, are strongly opposed
to the introduction of this amendment for various reasons, including:
(1) lack of demonstrated use cases showing a strong need among CC
licensees for this kind of an exception to the existing "anti-TPM"
language; (2) risks of unduly complicating the licenses which defeats
alot of the point of CC licenses being to be simple and easy to use
and understand; and, (3) the strong opposition to technological
protection measures by many in the CC community generally.

Consequently, CC is currently not proposing to include this new
parallel distribution language as part of version 3.0; however,
because it is not clear whether the Debian community will declare the
CC licenses DFSG-free without it and because it represents an
interesting proposal, we felt that it was appropriate to circulate
the proposal as part of the public discussions of version 3.0.

The discussion about version 3.0 will occur on this cc-licenses list.

Below are drafts of the US v 3.0 license, the new "generic" v 3.0
license and the parallel distribution language.






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