Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Greg London wrote:
> >> 3) allow DRM/TPM, but explicitly grant permission to crack it
> >
> > as i indicated in the table circulated on the list earlier, this is
> > not imo, a viable option.
>
>  I'm sorry. I must have skimmed over that email in a rampant battle
>  with spam. could you send a URL to the archives where this is
>  explained?

Obviously, I hadn't seen it either, so maybe it bears repeating?

>  Of all the options, I thought this was the best because it allowed
>  TPM, which should make debian folks happy, it didn't require parallel
>  distribution, which should make someone happy, and it authorizes
>  circumvention, which means that if TPM actually IS used to attempt a
>  fork, it cannot be maintained.

I like the explicit permission to crack TPM, because of these reasons,
but I would like the license to *also* require parallel distribution as
an additional safeguard.

The problem is that while the permission to crack the TPM defeats
the legal obstacle (at least barring Mia's objection, which as I say, I
haven't seen yet),  it still potentially leaves the technical obstacle
in place (IOW, we're still limited by the sophistication of our cracking
technology -- on the plus side, that provides a legitimization of such
technology projects, but I don't think that's a good enough reason).

A potential half-way point would be to re-word the anti-TPM language
to be more evidently anti-"use of TPM to impede distribution", e.g.:

"You may not use technological protection measure in such a way that
they impede the further distribution or examination of the content,..."

and then one could add the permission incidentally:

"furthermore you grant permission to circumvent any TPM measure
imposed on this content by you or others"

(obviously, IANAL, but I hope this conveys the general idea).

The point is, I'm pretty sure that enables Debian's "parallel distribution"
concept without a lot of complexity, without much change from what's
already in the license, and while still retaining a negative connotation
for TPM (which ISTM was the real objection at iCommons, from the
description I've heard).

On a related note, the United States congress is now considering a
bill to make this permission an implicit part of US law (a much better
long-run solution), in the form of "HR 1201" which is supposed to
amend the DMCA to allow circumvention, whenever access would
otherwise be permitted by copyright law (my paraphrase).  The EFF
has a nifty tool to help send your opinion to your congressman if you
are a US citizen:

http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=115

Cheers,
Terry


--
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com