Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

drew:
> This plan of course breaks down for a remix culture right? Jack makes a 
> track 
> and licenses it CC BY-NC. Jack puts his track up on ourmedia.org. Mary 
> finds 
> it and reworks it and re-records it and also used the CC BY-NC license. She 
> wants to put it up on Macjams.com where her other stuff is.
> 
> Surely she has not right to give such a license to Macjams? And thus no 
> right 
> to upload it to Macjams in the first place.

Yep. That's one of the biggest problems with NC, and the one that makes
it a failure as a "commons" license: Once two people have contributed to
a work, it becomes no more possible for either to profit from it (or
possibly even to distribute it on commercial sharing sites as
demonstrated here) than it would've been if the work were "all rights
reserved".

One of the advantages of a simple copyleft requirement (like the By-SA)
is that it works as well for the hosting site as for the people who
download the document from the site. So no second license is needed.

In what you describe as a "remix culture", only the symmetric aspects of
 a license can be exploited, because any assymetric term (i.e. that
grants different terms to the author than to anyone else) becomes
self-incompatible as soon as another author is added to the work.

By-SA, like the GPL, works better because only the symmetric terms are
needed by derivers. Strictly speaking there are assymetric terms -- the
author can violate the copyleft, but no one really needs that ability to
use the material. Again, strictly speaking, a hosting site could refuse
copyleft work (or insist you agree to a copyleft-incompatible license in
order to upload), but there's no compelling reason for them to do so.

So it's practical for a hosting company to offer free hosting for
copyleft work, but not under a non-commercial license. For NC, they need
the same thing as they would for ARR work -- a specific license to cover
their use.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com