Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] PROCEDURAL SUGGESTION

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • 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] PROCEDURAL SUGGESTION
  • Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 04:22:17 -0500

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






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page