Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Eric Garner <ejgarner AT yahoo.com>]

Until there's some case law around CC licensing,
everything here is just speculation. If a lawsuit ever
happens, then at least one of the arguments in this
thread will be rendered moot by the judge's verdict.
But with regard to the solidity of CC licenses, I
place faith in these two points:

- there are now CC works by everyone from solitary
bedroom producers up to giant media conglomerates. I
doubt the latter would have bothered without the
blessing of their legal departments, who doubtlessly
have muddled through all these arguments with a lot
more efficiency than we "IANAL"-types ever could.

- if (and when) a judge is presented with all of this
someday, I'm absolutely sure that s/he would wonder
why someone, inclined to share their work so liberally
as to use alternative licensing in the first place,
would turn around and file a lawsuit. If I were that
judge, I'd see such actions on the part of the
licensor as lawsuit-bate, and through the whole case
out.

Whether you're using CC or GPL or something yet
unknown, everything else follows from a single choice:
you either open-source or you don't. On the
open-source side, there are as many licenses as there
are licensors' interpretations of them - probably
millions. But the only interpretation that matters is
the one that the judge will read on paper. It'll then
be up to that judge to decide whether the licensor's
interpretation of the license fits, or is way
off-base. That decision will set the course for how
future open-source licenses will work.