Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Dana Powers" <dana.powers AT gmail.com>]

<snip/>
> You don't ordinarily have the right to distribute my work. It's the
> license which gives you the right to do so. The stipulation that the
> result of combining my work with another work may only be distributed
> if distributed under an equally free license no more creates a
> covenant to limit the licensee's natural rights than the stipulation
> that attribution must be provided, the technological measures can't be
> used, that the license must be identified, etc.
Yes, CC Licenses are basically contracts used to exchange certain
copyright entitlements for various promises to attribute, notify, use
and/or re-license in particular ways.

I am very skeptical, however, that tests like "distributed with" or
"semantically related" are legally feasible.  Movie soundtracks are a
bit easier because (among other things) the law already understands
what the movie industry calls "sync rights," and they are pretty easy
to define narrowly.  But is there an equivalent narrow legal right for
photos used in print?

> Nor is this behavior especially novel, the FSF has decades of
> experience getting compliance with the same behavioral aspects of the
> GPL.
Although the GPL still allows you to distribute on the same CD with
non-GPL code.  How would you distinguish the two?  If you say
"semantically related" I'll respectfully ask you to please define it
in a way that would be useful to a lawyer or judge.

Best,
Dana