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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Attribution license

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>
  • To: nic AT suzor.com, Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Attribution license
  • Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 13:14:05 -0500

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





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