Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

MJ Ray wrote:

> I feel how CC decision-making works was missed by the above answer.

Representatives of the national porting teams and various other interest 
groups, including a Debian-Legal cabal, reviewed the license drafts in 
private. The drafts have now been made public. A first round of comments 
on those drafts have been gathered and very thoroughly answered by CC, 
and here we are discussing them.

The public draft review process was announced some months ago on the CC 
weblog and I believe I and others publicised this in the community.

> "Because CC licenses are not drafted for software [...]"
>
> Does this mean that the CC licences will no longer be suitable for mp3s 
> and other software files?

I believe that Mia is here using the word "software" to refer to 
computer programs rather than to data files. CC licenses are not drafted 
for source code or for binary executables. They are drafted for cultural 
works, which includes works encoded in non-executable and 
non-human-readable formats such as MP3.

It is worthwhile repeating that CC licenses are not intended for 
computer programs ("software"). People are using NC and even ND licenses 
for PHP pages and abandonware for example, and this is harmful.

> On some of the points, the lack of developers on TPM-requiring platforms 
> speaking out seems to be advanced as reason to ignore the situation.  

Which situation? Actual users of CC licenses are overwhelmingly against 
DRM. I'm afraid that Debian Legal's arguments in favor of DRM are 
fundamentally flawed, as I have argued at length on this list and elsewhere.

> Is
> it really surprising that such developers are not posting to cc-licenses?

I don't understand why DRM platform developers wouldn't be posting to 
this list, which is easy to subscribe to, has public archives, and now 
has attachments in publicly documented formats.

- Rob.