Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> Fine.  I'll bite.  Dear lord.

Good lord is right.

> The idea of granting "rights" is likely very confusing for authors and
> artists who are used to the world of traditional media licensing.
> Rights are what the copyright holder "owns."  Giving rights away is
> not what artists who choose NC, for example, intend.

So, "freedom" is better?
Get real.
CC deals with licenses. Licenses deal with rights.
Freedom deals with... what? exactly?

Basically, what you're arguing here is that
artists don't want to give away rights,
so CC sugarcoats it and misdirects them by
saying they're doing something with "freedom".

But, in the end, artists are giving away some
set of rights when they use a CC license.
CC deals with licenses. Licenses can only deal with rights.

You are arguing for misdirection to the author to
get them to do what you want, rather than simply
being straight with them with plain language so
that it is clear exactly what they're doing.

Rights is exactly and only what they deal with
when they're dealing with a license.

But they're not always dealing with "freedom".

> They want to
> continue ownership of their distribution, performance, derivative,
> etc, rights so they can relicense those rights to commercial parties
> down the road.  Moreover, royalties collected by groups like ASCAP,
> BMI, SESAC, and SoundExchange are paid to the "rights" owner.  These
> "rights" are transferrable, and indeed transferred often in
> traditional licensing contracts.  CC licenses don't, however, transfer
> these "rights" and any confusion about that point would certainly be a
> hinderance to their further use.

What are you talking about? Of course a CC license transfers
some rights. Just not the rights that someone like
ASCAP would purchase.

It would appear that the defenders of "freedom" are
far more confused about the basic concepts of
copyrights and licenses than I thought.

Basically, you're saying that artists are too dumb to know
what a copyright or a license is, so you need to dumb it down
to emotive words like "freedom" for them to get it.

Sure.