Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Greg London wrote:
>  Parallel distribution does not solve the monopoly. It allows Dave to
>  maintain the monopoly, and only requires Dave to distribute a
>  parallel copy that will not play on the platform.

IOW, he has to offer to give you the same ink in a regular bottle. Which 
is nice, but totally useless on the platform, because the DMCA makes 
filling your own cartridges illegal!

>  The anti-TPM clause prevents this monopoly because it prevents Dave
>  from using DRM to restrict the rights to the work.

But dave can still sell you an empty cartridge and a refill kit so you 
*can* fill your cartridges with regularly-bottled ink, if he wants to.

In fact, he can sell you the bottle of ink and the refillable cartridge 
in a nifty package where the process of opening the package fills the 
bottle (at your discretion).  This eliminates the complaint that only 
die-hard do-it-yourselfers could use this system.

The reason this is important is that, if you are so-motivated, you can 
take the ink out, mix it with your cool new "metallic effect" mix-in, 
and pump *that* into the cartridge, thus improving on the original 
product.  That's what the FSF calls "freedom 1".

The unfortunate truth is that this breaks down a bit, because Dave can 
probably design his cartridge so that it will only accept the original 
ink mixture (this is hard to imagine for the ink, but in software, it 
just means the TPM wrapper recognizes a hash-signature on the content).  
OTOH, this is probably a lot more work for Dave than producing a generic 
wrapper, so maybe it's enough of a deterrant.

Not a bad metaphor.

Cheers,
Terry


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