Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mark Brown <broonie AT sirena.org.uk>]

On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 11:58:42PM -0400, Greg London wrote:

> Either you don't think the scenario is possible.
> Or you think that it's better to allow Dave a monopoly
> and access the content on his platform than to not
> be able to access the content on teh platform at all.

> Which is it?

I'm not Evan but speaking personally the latter is closer but it's a
much more positive statement than I would make.  It is more that since
there are likely to be perfectly reasonable use cases for the DRM or
pitfalls in attempting to develop a license that doesn't have unintended
side effects it's better to allow Dave to do what he wants.

> If Dave can have a monopoly on his platform,
> if Dave is the only person who can apply DRM
> to content for his platform, and if he is
> willing to take advantage fo that monopoly
> OF PLATFORM, do you support anti-TPM to prevent
> the monopoly?

> And how does parallel distribution do anything
> to prevent the platform monopoly in this scenario?

It does nothing to prevent it.

> And if Dave sets himself up for a platform monopoly,
> the gift economy should not allow him to abuse that
> position using Free content. No matter how much Alice
> and Bob might like to run some Linux software inside
> their Windows applications, no matter how much Alice
> and Bob might benefit from better linux code running
> in their Windows applications, Microsoft cannot benefit
> from Free software in their monopolistic system.

Microsoft actually provides some GPLed software as part of Windows
Services for Unix (and some other places too IIRC).  There are also
other pieces free software in use in the main Windows distribution but
they are under BSDish licenses rather than copyleft ones so aren't
really relevant here.

> The point of copyleft is to protect the gift economy
> from proprietary competition. Competition is proprietary

That's a very strong statement.  I'm not sure that competition is in
general the right word here: competition is fine, it's taking works out
of the copyleft system that poses a problem.

-- 
"You grabbed my hand and we fell into it, like a daydream - or a fever."