Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Version 3.0 - List Discussion Responses

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Version 3.0 - List Discussion Responses
  • Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:18:56 -0500

Greg London wrote:
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.

Greg, you keep pressing a point that's been disproved. The Debian parallel distribution concept removes the "loophole" you keep talking about, and it does so without imposing *use restrictions* on the end-user. Which is a really big deal -- at least to Debian and free software users.

Even the GPLv3 -- despite a harsh anti-TPM stance -- would appear to permit this kind of parallel distribution.

If your objection were true, free software would hardly exist anymore, because of "binary forks" (i.e. because the binary version isn't readable, therefore equivalent to TPM), but it's just *not* a problem, because the parallel distribution requirement for source code solves it. We've been doing this for 15+ years, and it still works.

In order to prove (to me, anyway) that parallel TPM/non-TPM distribution will have additional problems above and beyond parallel binary/source distribution, you need to express how TPM is different (in practical terms) from binary.

AFAICT, the only real difference is *intent*: the binary is unreadable because that's a practical necessity of running code in anything like reasonable timescales, while TPM is unreadable precisely to avoid understanding the content. But in practice, we often find binary distribution being used as TPM (in fact, I suspect that where the TPM folks got the idea), while TPM is -- as some have pointed -- a practical technical necessity for access on some platforms.

Seems to me that we have convergence: TPM <-> binary and source <-> non-TPM. They may have different provenances, but in both legal and technical applications, they are pretty much the same.

IF (as you suggest) this analogy is broken somehow (so that logic and practical experience based on 15+ years of binary/source distribution under the GPLv2 and similar copyleft licenses will not apply), where's the fundamental difference that I'm not seeing?

Cheers,
Terry

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





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page