Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Ah, I get the problem.
The law is based on a faulty metaphor.
Reification.
Treating an abstract concept as a physical thing.
In this case, land.

So, the bit is that DRM Dave puts DRM on ShareAlike Sam's
work. And suddenly, no one can access Sam's work except
through Dave's restricted set of DRM enforced provisions.
And your argument, that the law would not allow Alice
to circumvent Dave's DRM'ed copy of Sam's work because
Sam cannot give permission to crack Dave's DRM because
it will allow Alice to crack all of Dave's stuff, works
because the metaphor treats the work as a thing, a zero
sum game, in the form of land.

ShareAlike Sam creates a work. That work is in the form
of an unlimited herd of cows. DRM Dave putting DRM protection
on a particular instance of one of Sam's cows, is the
equivalent of hanging barbwire on a cow and letting it
walk around, but not letting anyone get close enough to
the cow to milk it or do anything DRM dave doesn't want
done with his copy. Never mind what Sam had in mind.

ShareAlike Sam put his work under copyleft so that
everyone could do the same things with any copy
of his cows. And if anyone created a modification,
then everyone would be able to access that version
of cow as well. The original and all derivatives
remain free. DRM Dave cannot create some derivative,
hang DRM barbwire around his copy of the cow, and then
restrict access to rights that Sam wanted to remain free.

I don't care how DRM Dave is prevented from doing this.

Obviously, you (Mia) have issue with pre-authorization of
permission to circumvent DRM Dave's barb wire.
You don't think it would hold up in court.
Frankly, given how whacked the law is, you might be right.
But I'm not attached to the method used to prevent
DRM Dave from tipping cows into barbwired enclosures
and calling them his. I just care about the results.

So, either (1) DRM Dave must be prevented from applying
DRM to any CC work, or (2) If he is allowed to apply
DRM to a CC work, he must provide a copy of the work
that has no DRM attachments.

The important thing is that Dave cannot be allowed
to create a derivative cow, called a horse, put a
barbwire saddle on it, and prevent anyone from
copying, distributing, or deriving that new version
of Sam's sharealike cow.

Dave cannot use barbwire to create a derivative that
only he has full rights to. I don't care how this
is accomplished, really. Just that it be rock solid
protection. Given the loopholes that future laws might
create that DRM Dave can exploit, and that isn't
protected against by an older CC license, I'm
inclined to say No DRM Allowed At All.

Greg

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Wikipedia and the Great Sneetches War
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