Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Tim Cas <darkuranium AT gmail.com>]

Hey there; I am new to the list and thus don't know if this has already been mentioned or not, but there is a certain clause in CC-BY-* licenses (except for -SA and possibly -NC) that keeps bothering me:

It is listed under 4.a (emphasis mine):

You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms of this License. You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that restrict the terms of this License or the ability of the recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. You may not sublicense the Work. You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform. When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work, You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. This Section 4(a) applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collection, but this does not require the Collection apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License. If You create a Collection, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collection any credit as required by Section 4(b), as requested. If You create an Adaptation, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Adaptation any credit as required by Section 4(b), as requested.

In case the mailing list or your email client has stripped the bold tags, here is the emphasis again:
You may not impose any
          effective technological measures on the Work that
          restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You
          to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under
          the terms of the License.

I am not a lawyer, but the way I see it, this imposes restrictions on technological mechanisms for copying and distribution. For example, from what I gather, software could not use a proprietary format for this since that imposes such a restriction. Note that a choice of proprietary formats is not necessarily malicious intent - for example, the proprietary format might simply be more efficient (in one or more aspects) to the original, or simply be the native format on the platform. One such example is Kindle's format - authors don't have much choice publishing for that platform, since Kindle does not support EPUB; the only alternative is an outdated format with half-broken support (disclaimer: I do not own a Kindle and thus do not know if the situation has changed - had it changed, however, I would probably have known as I am keeping taps on this).

Of course, this could be misused for DRM, but although I myself am against DRM, this is nevertheless probably not what the author intends when they release their software under CC-BY-* (-SA and possibly -NC notwithstanding).

Think about it - if the authors were worried about someone releasing this in (say) a proprietary format, wouldn't have they picked the -SA license in the first place? And if they were worried about DRM, wouldn't have they picked -NC?