Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> The fragmentation comes from Alice's gesture of
> making something free (to share at the very least)
> which is then levered into commercial space and
> suddenly becomes very un-free.

Ah, so the concern is Alice records a song,
licenses it CC-SA, then Bob comes along and
uses the compulsory license to make a
Non-Free cover of Alice's song. And Bob's
version remains AllRightsReserved.

I believe that is a legal possibility.

I don't see it as a huge issue.
Where copyleft becomes extremely important
is when you have a community project that
spans many, many generations of derivations,
many, many contributers. In that situation,
copyleft is a strategic move in game theory
terms that removes the possibility of the
community fracturing and working against itself.
Everything copyleft must remain copyleft.

And while technically Bob could use a compulsory
license to make an ARR version of Alice's original,
what that would more than likely do is give
Alice's song a huge amount of exposure, and attract
a whole bunch of new contributers who want to
make a CC-SA derivative of her version.

i.e. I believe a compulsory license can only
give you one "generation" of derivative from
the original.

As for money, Alice will get paid for
the compulsory license.

And Bob may be able to have exclusive rights to the
money to his version of the song, but my guess is
that were Bob's version to become hugely popular,
you'd see people go to Alice's original, make some
derivatives that are reminiscient of Bob's version,
or even better than Bob's version, and those would
get free airplay.

So, I think that for the situation of using a
compulsory license on a CC-SA song, I think the
Free version of the song will get plenty of
benefit, Alice will get some money for the
compulsory license, and the new people drawn to
Alice's community could all contribute to the
Free version to make it even better than Bob's
version.