Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> Now, this will all shake out after people figure
> out exactly how the whole shebang works, but we
> should at least see that it is possible to make
> these sort of nasty players even if zune is not
> one at this time.

The wikipedia article on Zune is interesting
and fairly to the point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Zune

Release set for November 15.
Firmware is updatable.
Which means exactly what this thing will and
will not do is completely subject to change.

Towards the top, the article says it supports
mp3, wma, wmv, mpeg4, jpeg, and aac.

What it does not say is whether or not any
of the content can be distributed without DRM.
Apparently it repeats drew's assertion that
the 3-day limit is only applied to works
distributed via wifi, which seems stupid to me
in the first place, but what do I know.

Whether or not DRM is attached to wifi content
will be easy to determine as soon as two people
have real hardware in their hands.

Alice will put some open content on her Zune
device. She will then transfer it to Bob via
the wifi connection. Bob will then attempt
to upload  it from his Zune to his PC. If the
upload is prohibited, then you have a
technological protection measure applied to
the content, and Microsoft lied.



Towards the bottom, the article says the Zune
will have some sort of DRM that artists can
apply to their content so they can sell it
on Zune. Free samples via wifi that plays
three times, and then you have to pay.

Which brings me back to one of my earlier points.
Anti-TPM is something needed by copyleft and
sharealike licenses. If a work is licensed
CC-BY or CC-ND or some such thing, then there
is no community need for protection from DRM Dave's
platform monopoly. CC-BY allows proprietary forks,
so I do not understand why CC-BY would not allow
a DRM fork.

If Alice takes some CC-BY work, creates a proprietary
fork, and wants to use Microsoft's DRM to sell that
work, I don't see why this isnt allowed. Proprietary
forking is not prohibited by CC-BY, and TPM/DRM
is another type of proprietary fork. Platform monopolies
are not a concern of works licensed CC-BY, or any
license that doesn't invoke CC-SA. So I don't have
a problem with anti-TPM only being applied to CC-SA.

I wouldn't have a problem with CC keeping the anti-tpm
clause in all its licenses, but I wouldn't have a problem
if it dropped it for the non ShareAlike license.

Do with that what you will.
Greg London

-- 
Wikipedia and the Great Sneetches War
http://www.somerightsreserved.org