Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

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