Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Monday 26 February 2007 03:04 pm, Dana Powers wrote:
> > Image libraries seem to have no trouble defining the circumstances in
> > which use
> > of their copyrighted material requires payment, or the scope and nature
> > of use that they will consider at all. They do not use an existing narrow
> > right, they use an existing blanket right and give permission to exercise
> > this right in narrow circumstances with carefully worded limits and
> > requirements.
>
> Except their method is "reproduction is ok if you pay me enough"  That
> doesn't translate into the world of CC very well.  

Why? That is how you can use my original copyleft works without putting your 
derivative under a copyleft license. That would certainly seem to be the game 
a lot of the NC people are playing.

> Moreover, image 
> libraries benefit from the flexibility of commercial negotiation.
> CC's primary reason for creating standard open licenses is to define
> clearly areas in which no commercial negotiation is required.  

This is just not so, NC is used to force commercial negotiation for all 
commercial uses.

In the GPL world, the dual license players where one license is not Free 
generally play the same game.

> Because 
> rules for a given circumstance can be defined clearly in such a
> negotiated contract does not mean that clarity can be abstracted
> appropriately into a broad license which would be applied to every
> possible situation.

Now this could be so. It may be a very difficult thing to do cleanly.
>
> > So real-world experience shows that the case of illustrations doesn't
> > need a new
> > narrow right, it doesn't need the meaning of any legal terms to be
> > changed, and
> > it doesn't need the scope of the license to be limited discretely by the
> > terminology used by the law.
>
> As explained above, I think this does not logically flow from the
> existence of commercial contracts.
>
> It may be useful to recall that synch rights are presumed to be
> reserved by music publishers when a right of reproduction (i.e.,
> mechanical rights) is granted.  My question was really whether such a
> presumption existed in the photography community.  If not, then we'd
> be inventing a new way to carve up rights.  Would the existing photo
> industry (amateurs and pros alike) understand our new way of talking
> about photo rights?  Maybe, maybe not.  It should be clear by now that
> I believe this is a huge undertaking, and I'm skeptical that CC is in
> a good position to do it well.
>
> On the other hand, I'm quite willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Well, to use a sledge hammer where a jeweler's hammer might do, you could 
just 
not permit even copying in cases of aggregation where any of the works in the 
aggregation or collection or combined work are under an accepted  non-Free 
license. This would be clear and simple. It may do way more than is wanted, 
but some may consider it an improvement over the current situation, which 
does way less than is wanted.

I think this may apply to way more than photographs and illustrations. I 
think 
those are just the examples that have kicked this issue off this time.

So,the trick would be to find better language to get to a happy middle ground.
>
> Best,
> Dana

all the best,

drew
-- 
(da idea man)