Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Sat, 2006-30-09 at 20:59 +0100, Rob Myers wrote:
> The second point is not a breach of the FSD, and is not a breach of Fair 
> Use IMHO (the use is not personal and is competitive). I also believe 
> that it is not a breach of the DFSG, but *even if it was* this would not 
> be a primary issue for a Free Culture license rather than a Free 
> Software one.

So, this is probably an important line of discussion that needs to be
kiboshed ASAP.

For Debian, we are increasingly concerned with digital artifacts --
sometimes called "software" -- that are not computer programs, namely
music, video, text, databases, and images. These show up in games; in
documentation; in Web applications; as elements of graphical user
interfaces (GUIs); and in any number of fascinating extra ways.

To run, the Debian system run requires all of these kinds of digital
objects. Therefore, it's important to us that our users and downstream
developers are able to exercise the exact same rights to these kinds of
digital artifacts as they can for computer programs.

So: we are absolutely concerned about Free Culture items and licenses;
we wouldn't have wasted 2 years on this process if we weren't.

Finally, and importantly: there is nothing new under the sun. Music and
video is not in any way different from computer programs because of the
existence of various DRM technologies; in fact, quite the opposite. Copy
protection schemes have been an important part of proprietary computer
program distribution since at least the beginning of the personal
computing era.

Free software licenses have been almost universally silent on the issue
of copy protection because those licenses that require derivative copies
to be Free count on a form of parallel distribution (source
availability), and those that don't require downstream copies to be free
don't make any such demands.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou -- http://evan.prodromou.name/

"By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart
of on the same terms." -- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"