Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Eric Garner <ejgarner AT yahoo.com>]

--- drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com> wrote:

> It is a straight-up copyright and a license in
> combo.

No, there is no transfer of copyright involved
whatsoever. It's only a license, granting a "copy
right" to the licensee under certain conditions.

> And I might not have the terminology right, but
isn't > this very thing 
> done all 
> the time?

> North American First Publishing Rights.
> Serial Rights.
> Movie Rights.
> Etc. Etc.

> Granted, CC is a twist on this, but still.

You are correct.

> The way I have had the law explained to me is that
> you get the copyright 
> automatically. Unless you assign that to someone
> else later, you have to 
> copyright. Everything else is a license grant or
> contract or whatever.

You are correct here, too.

What I was saying is that CC has not been tested in
court so there is none to use as a guidepost, yet. But
the organizations you list, and all others like them,
have provided enough case law to shore up CC licenses
or anything else that might come along which does
something similar. When there is case law pertaining
directly to CC someday, it'll help fill in the
remaining blanks for us. We can agree or disagree all
we want in the meantime, but none of us here can
really predict which way it'll turn out. I make an
estimated guess by looking at the adoption of CC
licenses by organizations with the ways and means of
estimating their strength a little better than we
small-timers can.