Development of Creative Commons licenses

[rob AT robmyers.org]

Quoting Nic Suzor <nic AT suzor.com>:

> Personally, I'm after a copyleft licence which allows use in closed
> systems, as long as any modifications to the licensed content are
> released in some unencumbered form.
>
> I don't mind if someone uses my content on a closed platform, but I
> want to see the improvements come back.

All the examples that people are using to discuss DRM use severly limited
platforms as their examples. The iPod, PS3 games, snow globes, mobile phone
ringtones and so on are all read-only, single purpose or otherwise limited in
ways unrelated to whether they use DRM or not. It is difficult to make them
less usable than they already are. DRM does achieve this, but such limited
contexts are not the only use of DRM.

It is possible to get DRM that allows work to be 
circulated/played/read/viewed,
but not copied & pasted (for example). Or to have work that is freely
modifiable, but will not play outside a specific DRM system. The former
scenario is taken from Lessig's Adobe Reader example, the latter is the sales
pitch of DRM for corporate document security and for family photos. We'll
ignore the former as I'm sure people are aware of it and understand how it
interacts with the existing anti-TPM language.

If we have DRM that our grandmothers can apply (mine was the first in 
the family
with a VCR and a SNES and used to go to programming classes between bridge
sessions, but I get the idea ;-) ), this does not solve the problem that
individuals who can apply DRM that allows modification of the encumbered work
but not removal of the DRM itself will find themselves unable to comply with
the dual distribution requirement. Their ability to comply with the 
license has
been removed one step further downstream, but it has still been removed.

If they are capable of getting a non-DRM version and reproducing their 
creation
of the work that they made under the DRM system, they would waste a lot less
time by simply not using the DRM in the first place. ;-)

- Rob.