Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> On Wed, 2006-29-11 at 21:20 +0000, Rob Myers wrote:
>
>> >   Since the dominant argument against parallel distribution on this
>> >   list seems to boil down to a critique that the clause provide a way
>> >   to sidestep copyleft,
>>
>> The clause provides a way of removing people's rights.
>
> That's simply not true. Nobody loses any rights from having the clause
> added, and your net freedom is greater with a parallel distribution
> clause than without it.

Don't get too tripped up in the language.
The whole thing must be looked at in the context of the timeline.

Start at the point when Copyleft/ShareAlike licenses were created.
DRM wasn't considered at the time.

Move forward in time until DRM is considered an issue for
Copyleft and ShareAlike licenses.

Why was it considered an issue to Copyleft/ShareAlike licenses?
Because DRM allows platform monopolies, which allow someone
to effectively take a work private on a hardware platform.

The DRM only hardware platform allows DRM Dave to treat a
ShareAlike work as if it were not ShareAlike.

Without any DRM clause of any kind, ShareAlike has a loophole
that allows DRM Dave to use the work without sharing the work
on his platform. Only he can distribute works on his platform.
Only he can create derivatives on his platform.

The proposed change to the Creative Commons license is needed
to close this loophole. Parallel Distrubition will not close it,
because it still allows DRM Dave to use sharealike content
on his DRM only platform without actually sharing it on his
platform. Only he can distribute works that play on his platform.
Only he can create derivatives on his platform. Parallel Distribution
does not close this loop hole.

The problem is not that the content is not available in a
non-DRM version. CC-SA versions of the works are available
already from ShareAlike-Sam.

The problem is that a DRM-Only platform can take CC-SA works
and treat them as proprietary forks on that platform.
The works are no longer treated as copyleft works.

Now, we can argue whether parallel distribution adds rights
that weren't there before or not. But it's irrelevant.
It adds a minor right, but doesn't solve the problem of
a DRM=only hardware platform using the works as if they
were no longer ShareAlike on that hardware platform.

Parallel Distribution adds a right for a free parallel copy
formatted for some other open platform. That ignores the
original problem that the DRM-Only platform treats the work
as no longer ShareAlike.

Copyleft and Sharealike are designed so that all copies
of all instances of all originals and all derivatives
of the work that get distributed are equal.

DRM creates a loophole not addressed in the original CC-SA
license so that works on DRM-Only platforms get special
priviledges on that platform so that they are no longer
equal. Parallel distribution does not make them equal.

The instance of the work on the DRM platform has more
proprietary priveledges than the parallel copy.

Greg


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