Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

drew Roberts wrote:
>  Here is a plan that I don't like and would like to prevent.
>
>  Write a game for a TPM platofrm. Use my BY-SA works in the game.
>  Paralled distribution of my works seperately. Game can only play on
>  the bad platform. So, is there some way to require parallel
>  distribution (working mind you) of the whole project? (I hope this is
>  a little clearer than mud.)

Yes, that's unpleasant, but there's no protection against that, and TPM 
provisions have nothing to do with it. The same thing can happen if you 
have a set of resources used by a Windows platform (non-TPM) game, that 
is only available in a proprietary binary form.

It is the fundamental concept of separation of "content" and "engine" 
(or "data" and "program") that creates this loophole, and has nothing to 
do with TPM.

The alternative is undesirable, even if there were some way to make it 
legally binding:

If the license of the program controlled the license of data created 
with it, or the license of data controlled the license of programs that 
processed it, then many worse situations would arise:

1) You couldn't write proprietary, BSD-licensed, or other-licensed code 
in gcc: everything would be under the same GPLv2+ license that gcc is.

2) If you wrote a story and licensed it CC-By-SA, then people using 
Microsoft Word (or Internet Explorer, or Opera) couldn't legally read 
it. In fact, even Mozilla couldn't be used, because it's under the MPL, 
not the CC-By-SA (and they aren't compatible).

and so on

Even in the remote case that you did like this scenario, you really 
don't have the legal authority, because you're overstepping the bounds 
of the work (you don't have any legal ownership over the things you want 
to control the license to -- even the copyleft can't claim it).

Cheers,
Terry

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