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

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • 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 18:58:31 -0500

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





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