Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Alek Tarkowski wrote:
>  I agree with the previous voices regarding the state of this
>  discussion. My personal feeling is that nothing good comes out of
>  mailing list discussions where people start intensively
>  replying-to-replies-of-replies, commenting each other's every
>  sentence back and forth.

But, IMHO, this has been a pretty congenial and constructive discussion.

>  Similarly, when Paul wrote about "public discussion" recently, I
>  wasn't sure that's the right term, and I think it's important to name
>  things for what they are. I agree that in many ways it is a public
>  discussion - it is open to anyone interested. But at the same time,
>  due to its range and for many probably reasons, I do not feel it is a
>  true "public" discussion - mainly because the number of participants
>  is limited

Well, it is a shame there aren't more people contributing, but in my 
experience this happens a lot on mailing list discussions. Often there 
are lurkers who simply feel that someone else has already expressed 
their opinion. Other times, it just means no one really cares.  I hope 
it's the former!

>  Flickr, or the open access community, or netlabels, etc.

My guess is that they'll be happy with whatever CC chooses to do. They 
are likely broadly happy with the existing licenses and trust that 
"interested" or "expert" people will figure out all these "fiddly 
details".  I can't say I really blame them.  The TPM issue is largely 
immaterial to them, because they are doing web-based sharing, which 
means that no TPM is needed, and no platform that can access them is 
"TPM-only".

Since TPM-only platforms are mostly still just dystopic science fiction, 
there's probably a lot of people for whom the discussion is still just 
too academic.

>  (other than Debian and MIT,

Debian (and I guess, MIT) had specific objections to the wording of the 
previous license, but a strong feeling existed that the licenses should 
in principle be compatible, since the rhetoric used to promote them is 
similar to the ideologies expressed by those organizations.

Indeed, as a user of both the CC licenses and Debian, I find it 
downright bizarre that CC-By and CC-By-SA are not already considered 
admissable to Debian main. So naturally, there's a strong desire to get 
over any obstacles.

Debian is both completely committed to free-licensing and also to 
supporting a wide range of platforms.  So it's only natural that they'd 
be the first ones hit in a "DRM Dystopia" scenario.  Hence their strong 
interest.

I am personally working on a project under the CC-By-SA license that I 
would someday like to see admitted to Debian main, and I've used it for 
a number of articles I've written.  As a user, there is a lot of 
documentation under CC-By-SA or CC-By licenses that would be nice to 
have included as well.  IMHO, CC-By-SA is a superior license to the 
FSF's FDL, which I think is over-complicated, so I hate to see FDL being 
accepted when CC-By-SA is not.

To be honest, that's why I joined this discussion, and I was originally 
here to promote the Debian parallel distribution idea. But, after much 
hashing out of scenarios, I'm now sold on the idea that it doesn't solve 
the TPM issue.  I also see that the FSF has come to the same conclusion, 
and I believe that puts the ball back in Debian's court.  I will 
probably re-join Debian legal, and take that discussion to them.  
Perhaps the scenarios we've discussed here will be new to them.  But 
that's not a topic for this list.


If you want to take a quick vote amongst the people listening, here's 
what I'd say today:

1) Should the CC version 3 licenses be amended to adopt the Debian 
parallel distribution proposal (which would allow TPM'd content to be 
distributed as long as a non-TPM version is distributed in parallel)?

No.

2) Should the CC version 3 license be drafted to clarify that private 
application of TPM, without distribution is legal (even though this is 
probably currently true due to the fair use clause)?

Yes.


>  (And does it really matter to us?, I may add...)

I suppose that depends on who "we" are.  It matters to me.

Cheers,
Terry

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