Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> I'd love the response from
> drew/Rob/Greg/Terry/whoever.

I just got back from vacation.
I'm slogging through 350 emails.

> In the essay, we used the example of a mobile phone but I think I can do
> better here:
>
>   Let's say that there is a popular piece music under a permissive
>   CC license. Now let suppose that a manufacturer of electronic
>   greeting cards and small musical snow-globes wants to use that
>   piece of music as part of their cards and music boxes. Neither
>   devices have the ability to modify the music or even to copy it
>   off.
>
> First, is this a violation of the current anti-TPM language?
> It seems to me that it probably is. If you think that is not,
> I'd love to hear why

I assume that the license wording for "TPM" would mean something
that actively restricts the rights. The most notable red-flag
would be something that uses encryption of some kind and therefore
gets the anti-circumvention clause as legal protection.

But no one considers an iPod's inability to "DERIVE" a CC-SA song
to be a violation of the CC-SA license.

Your greeting card thingy can't even COPY or DISTRIBUTE a song
by its hardware design. It's more like an iPod that just wasn't
built to do certain things than some Technological Protection Measure
intended to create some channel that allows distribution of CC-SA
works without respecting ShareAlike.

Now, if you can plug your SnowGlobe into your PC and download
new songs, you damn well better be able to get access to those
songs somewhere along the path.

And if on the off chance that you can access the internal memory
of that snowglobe via the 4-pin JTAG port, then a little bit of
software and a bit of wiring to create an interface from you PC
should do the trick. And this won't invoke Anti=Circumvention
violations, so should be legal, and shouldn't be a problem.


> If not, why can works licensed under CC licenses without ND clauses be
> distributed to devices that cannot modify their content (i.e., anything
> with read only media)?

The difference is actually very, very simple.

DRM-Dave can exercise some right on the platform.
But you can't.

If the HARDWARE ALLOWS COPYING, but TPM Prevents everyone but DAVE
from Copying, then you're looking at special priviledges for Dave.
The work is no longer being shared equally.

Your greeting card thingy isn't built with something inside it that
acts as gatekeeper and asks if you are Dave or someone and allows
Dave to do something and prevents everyone else from doing the same
thing. It is just by design unable to exercise the right for anyone.
No one can copy because the thing simply doesn't have the functionlaity
built into it. It doesn't matter who you are.

Greg

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