Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> 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.

I think this is an unfair telling of history.
Free software licenses have been silent about
copy protection for a long time because
copy protection on PC's and the like
was being abandoned by most distributers
as ineffective and problematic.

And then in 1998, the DMCA made it illegal to
thwart copy protection, and I believe that's
when Free software licenses started taking notice.

But there was a period of time, a decade or so,
where FLOSS licenses existed and copy protection
was a non-issue because it was always technically
possible to circumvent it without the FBI busting
down your door.

That is no longer the case now. And since the
DMCA has changed the terrain, I believe that's
when FLOSS licenses started addressing it as
a proprietary threat that needed dealing with.

Greg

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