Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> but it's extremely obvious when you're
> talking about computer hardware: it's very clear that if you have a
> copyleft license on chip design that is invoked when you distribute the
> chips, that a copyleft which binds "any larger assembly" is going to be
> ludicrous in the end (from my paper on the subject):

Almost none of the lessons of open hardware apply to software
or art or multimedia works. Hardware is a very odd duck.
The thing is that copyright applies to the description of
hardware, but not the implementation.  The description of
some logic in Verilog can be covered by copyright, but when
you implement that logic in an ASIC, the ASIC doesn't count
as a "derivative" of the original work. In the asic, it's
all about the functionality, and there really is no expression.

There's a special case added to copyright law so that
ASIC masks (the masks used to produce an asic) is covered
by copyright law, but otherwise, it's an alien world.

Hardware implementation is more like "usage" when it comes
to copyright. And copyright doesn't cover usage. You could
probably write a license that controlled usage in some way
or another, but the Open Source Definition basically says
that's a no-no.

Greg