Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

These licenses would not be used for community projects.
They would be not likely be used for projects with
multiple derivatives and multiple contribers.

They would be used by individual authors who wish to
make a public committment that they don't need a copyright
of Life+70 to create artistic works, but may want the
All Rights Reserved capability for a shorter time.

Maybe someone would be willing to write a novel under
a fixed term of 40 years. A number of published novelists
have told me that they would be happy with Life+15,
others with Life+40.

The thing is that these people are generally not heard
from when the copyright debate comes up. They're not
supporting the "cool" licenses like BY or SA or GPL,
which means the FLOS organizations generally ignore them.
but then, they're not part of the "eternal copyright"
movement either.

I was looking for a way these authors could actually
make their views known in a public way that would also
be something recognizable, searchable, and possibly
get authors talking amongst themselves about what sort
of term they would be willing to write under.

Potentially, it could accumulate as a counterbalance
to the forever less one day crowd. If a large number
of authors publicly declare they'll write novels for
some shorter period, how can the MPAA or RIAA argue
that they are representing all artists when they say
they need longer terms when Steamboat Mickey is about
to go Public Domain?

This is a place on the "Spectrum of Rights", it's
just attacking absurd copyright terms from a different end.

Greg London


> Greg wrote:
>
>> that authors could place their works under which would
>> put the work into the public domain at Life+15, which
>
> Whilst that sounds like a good idea, I'm not sure it will scale.
>
> Scenario:
> John Doe released a document under CC-BY-SA-Life+15 in 2010.
> John Doe dies on a lecture tour in 2011;
> John wade edits/revises/updates the article in 2015.
> John Wade dies in a plane crash the day after he uploads the article
> to the Internet under the CC-BY-SA-Life+15 license.
> Jane Doe revises John Wade's document in 2025, and releases under the
> same  CC-BY-SA-Life+15 license.
>
> When is that fifteen years up?
> * 2026 --- fifteen years after John Doe dies;
> * 2030 --- fifteen years after John Wade dies;
> * Fifteen years after Jane Doe dies;
>
> xan
>
> jonathon
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