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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Version 3.0 - List Discussion Responses

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Version 3.0 - List Discussion Responses
  • Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 13:37:03 -0500

Evan Prodromou wrote:
On Mon, 2006-02-10 at 10:10 -0400, Greg London wrote:
> CC-ShareAlike is intended for community projects that need copyleft
> protection to prevent a proprietary interest from taking the
> project private and using that copy to compete against the open
> project.
[...]
For myself, I know that, as the author many Attribution-ShareAlike
works and organizer of one of the largest Attribution-ShareAlike
projects around, my intention is to ensure that developers of
derivative works grant the same rights that they were granted. I'm
not afraid of competition if I can re-incorporate any additions back
into my work.

This is why this issue needs to be bounced back to Debian Legal. The promotion of the parallel distribution idea fails to provide this assurance, as Greg has demonstrated with his "DRM Dave" example. That example needs to join the "Dissident" and "Desert Island" tests, because it shows why the parallel distribution model violates the DFSG.

What has happened here is that the analogy of TPM/non-TPM to binary/source has been pushed too far -- past fundamental breakages, in fact. I challenged Greg on precisely those grounds: that he needs to show how the analogy is broken if he wants to make his case.

IMHO, he did so. I now see that the analogy is broken in at least two ways:

1) It's law, not code that makes DRM unbreakable, and that, in particular, denies the user the right (freedom 1) to make a modified version of a received copy and play it (receiving the non-TPM version doesn't help, because you still can't apply the TPM to run it). This is the reason in principle why parallel distribution shouldn't be permitted. The CC-3 licenses won't allow it, and I believe I've shown that GPL-3 won't either.

2) Unlike binaries, which must be compiled from source in a complex and error-prone process which makes it very inconvenient for end-users to have to work from source distribution only, TPM is completely automatable, and has no complex system of dependencies: there's just an original work and a couple of keys. Thus, a TPM-only platform can be supported by automatic application of TPM if tools are provided to apply it (this has the further advantage that it discourages -- though it unfortunately doesn't actually prohibit -- the TPM-platform-owner from creating TPM-based monopoly of free content works on their platform). The principle point of this breakage is that it kiboshes (to use your word) the argument that end users "need" to have DRM distribution.

There are a number of projects that offer software implementing
patented techniques under the GPL. Yahoo! DomainKeys comes
immediately to mind:

This is a red-herring. If the patents were enforced against users, the "liberty or death" part comes into play in GPLv2, and of course, GPLv3 has quite specific language against this case.

Cheers,
Terry

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





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