Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> In my opinion all this list is doing is at best
> providing some advice? food for thought? to Mia
> who is drafting the license.

I think some concerns about the draft have been
raised to CC and have resulted in some rewording
of the license to clarify and fix some problems.

I think the other point of this discussion is
to respond to Debian folks who have stated they
will not declare CC-SA to be "Free" if it contains
the anti-TPM clause. Now would be the time to
raise such concerns about the potential non-Freeness
of the license, while it is still in Draft form
rather than being released.

I apologize for sending a lot of emails as part of
this back and forth. At first, the issue was new to
me, I needed clarifications, and then was struggling
to come up with the best, closest metaphor to DRM
that explains why I think the anti-TPM clause is
needed to keep the license Free.

I think that if nothing else, this discussion forced
me to come up with the shortest, clearest possible
explanation of my point of view that I could manage.
If anyone wishes to further debate the anti-TPM clause
versus parallel distribution, I can simply post a link
to my "short short anti-TPM" post over here:

https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2006-October/004284.html

rather than engage in more debate.

As to Debian's concerns, I believe anti-TPM is better
than parallel distribution, so I don't think CC needs
to change the CC-SA draft. Whether Debian comes around
to that way of thinking, I don't know, but this discussion
has helped clarify things for me.

Also, one other result of this discussion, I believe,
is the suggestion that CC could drop the anti-TPM
clause from the CC-BY license. I would support that change,
and I believe some other people have suggested it as well.
Whether CC does that or not, I don't know, but at least,
they've heard the reasons why.

> I do not feel it is a true "public" discussion -
> mainly because the number of participants is limited.

part of that may have been due to the number of
messages I sent, and I squelched the channel a bit.
As I said, if further debate comes up specifically
about anti-TPM versus parallel distribution, I'll just
send a URL to my "short short anti-TPM" post, rather
than send lots of emails back and forth.

> One thing that makes me curious - why no significant
> institutional user of our licenses - say a site like
> Flickr, or the open access community, or netlabels, etc.

Is Flickr and similiar sites proponents of Freedom,
or are they simply providing user services for whatever
their users want? I don't see them as having much
interest in Free content, as I do see them having interest
in providing whatever services their customers want.

> (other than Debian and MIT, as far as I understand) is
> present in this discussion. Do they really don't care
> about the shape of the licenses?

Debian says they want parallel distribution or they
won't declare CC-SA to be Free. MIT, I believe, is more
interested in the "educational" license than anything
else. And "educational" is CC-SA-NC, at which point,
DRM clauses become more irrelevant because DRM-Dave
has no monetary incentive to monopolize the content
on his DRM-only platform. He could monopolize it,
but he can't make any money from it.

Greg

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