Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Sat, 2006-30-09 at 22:40 -0400, drew Roberts wrote:
> You seem to have faith that we will never get to the point where only Single 
> Source DRM only players are available. I, on the other hand, am not so sure.
One more time: how does an anti-DRM clause help us when this happens? You seem fairly convinced of the imminence of this scenario, but it's not
> OK, so why not talk of allowing it only where general users can apply the DRM 
> if they wish?
Because it's really hard to guarantee environmental conditions for downstream users. Copyleft licenses usually stop at making sure that the work is available for modifying, distributing, etc. Putting demands on the distributor to ensure certain conditions of a work (for a computer program, say, requiring that no- or low-cost compilers for the target language are readily available, that testing versions of the platform can be obtained for little or no cost, dot dot dot) would make it impossible to distribute programs at all.
>  Or what about a non-distribute on DRM versions of CC files?
That's the case right now, isn't it? Copyright licenses typically can't restrict what you do with a work if you don't distribute it.

~Evan