Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> preventing forks is not the point of anti-TPM language.

It is MY point.  I know you keep casting this as political
battle, that the only reason to oppose TPM is for spite,
or to fight the evils that are TPM and the copyright
overlords. But that isn't me.

I think TPM should be prohibited in copyleft licenses
because copyleft is intended to prevent forks and I think
TPM could be used to create the functional effect of a
fork.

> TPM applied by a third party can restrict a licensee's
> rights that a licensor intended in the case of any CC
> license.  TPM can potentially (in TPM imaginary world
> anyway) prevent forks -- by preventing derivative works!

ShareAlike Sam creates a work. He licenses it CC-SA.
He wants everyone to be able to edit the work,
but he wants anyone who distributes modifications to
make sure that any derivatives are as free as the original.

TPM Tom comes along, creates a derivative, and hides the
content behind TPM such that the only person who can
copy, distribute, or derive that new version is Tom.
And because of the DMCA, no one can access the new work
without breaking the anti-circumvention clause.

Tom has created a proprietary fork.
No one can access the work but by Tom's permission.
If Tom is the sort to give permission,
then he wouldn't have a problem with parallel distribution
or with authorizing circumvention of his DRM up front.

But if Tom does not wish to grant permission,
if he doesn't want to give free access to his
derivative, then he doesn't have to, and Sam
cannot take him to court for any sort of
license violation.

> Besides, removing the anti-TPM language from everything *except* BY-SA
> would satisfy almost nobody (except you :) as BY-SA is one of two
> licenses Debian could potentially approve and they have a problem with
> the anti-TPM language.  If there was a case for removing anti-TPM
> language from only some licenses it would make most sense to do nearly
> the opposite of what you propose (remove only from "community"
> licenses)!

I still do not understand why debian opposes anti-TPM.
Yes,  some might push for anti-TPM for political reasons,
but in the case of someone like ShareAlike Sam who wants
to keep a work, and all its derivatives, free, anti-TPM
is required to close a loophole created by TPM and the
anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. Together, those
two can be used to create a proprietary fork. And people
who want copyleft protection to prevent proprietary forking
need some sort of anti-tpm clause.

Someone who licenses their work CC-BY obviously doesn't
care about proprietary forks. They are committing the
work one step shy of Public Domain. Anyone can create any
sort of fork they wish. They could take the work and
put it under CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA, or CC-BY-ND, or even
All Rights Reserved. As long as they satisfy the
attribution requirements, they can create any fork they
wish. So prohibiting TPM in the CC-BY license seems
like a politically motivated clause. It isn't needed
because the original author didn't care about proprietary
forks anyway.

Greg

-- 
Wikipedia and the Great Sneetches War
http://www.somerightsreserved.org