Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Nic Suzor wrote:
>  Using Greg's use cases, I don't believe that the attribution only
>  licence should prohibit DRM. If ShareAlike-Sam creates content which
>  he is happy for anyone to use, in practically any way, as long as
>  they give him credit, I can't read in an extra restriction that says
>  'as long as you're not DRM-Dave (or microsoft, or whoever)'. The very
>  permissive nature of this licence shouldn't discriminate on fields
>  of use - from the free software perspective, people who use the
>  revised-BSD style licences are more than happy for their code to be
>  reused in proprietary, locked-up platforms.

You may be correct that not restricting DRM distribution is more consistent
with the principles of the By license, but let's be clear: this is NOT a 
question of "use restrictions" but of "distribution restrictions".  The 
various free software definitions all allow distribution restrictions in 
principle.

Of course, the assumption that what people who use BSD licenses want 
should be comparable to what people who use CC-By want is a common, but 
not necessarily accurate assumption.  People using CC-By, know that even 
if the work is bound up with proprietary materials, it will generally be 
possible to extract it (because it's targeted to media such as visual 
arts and music which are directly sensible to the user).   It's not 
clear that anyone is counting on that, but they may be (after all, if 
you really don't care, you can *use* the BSD license for music or art, 
or you can just grant it to the public domain if you also don't care 
about attribution).

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com