Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Kent Mewhort <kmewhort AT cippic.ca>]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Francesco Poli <invernomuto AT paranoici.org> wrote:

Exactly, an anti-DRM clause is similar to a strong copyleft mechanism
(with source availability requirement), in some respects.
And, like a copyleft mechanism, it *should* allow parallel distribution.

I agree that an anti-DRM clause it is similar to copyleft, which leads me to the following question here: why put this clause in CC-BY and CC-NC, rather than limit it to only CC-SA?

CC-BY is intentionally the most permissive license in the batch (other than CC0), such that including a somewhat restrictive anti-TPM clause seems incongruent with this aim.  On the other hand, CC-SA serves a similar role as copyleft licenses such as GPL and it thus makes sense to include either an anti-TPM or parallel distribution clause.  Some further thoughts on this...:

BY, BY-ND & BY-NC: For redistributions of the original works under these licenses, the restrictions imposed by an anti-TPM or parallel distribution clause appear to be of very little benefit, especially as balanced against the drawbacks.  As long as there's attribution, a user will usually be able to find the original source and retrieve a non-TPM'd version (of course, it is always open for the original author to only distribute TPM'd versions in the first place, but in this case I don't see why such an author would even release under CC at all).

For redistribution of derivative works under CC-BY (and, to a lesser extent, CC-NC), an anti-TPM clause also doesn't seem to mesh with the general permissiveness of the license. Additionally, there are also many other permitted ways that the new author can similarly reduce the openness of the work, even without TPMs.  Foremost, she can attach whatever restrictive licensing terms that she wants, as long she attributes the original author.  She may also apply watermarks and other such physical protection measures.

BY-SA: Here, anti-TPMs (or parallel distribution) does seem necessary.The whole point of SA is that it forces authors of derivative works to also openly share their modifications, under the same terms; if a derivative work is distributed with TPMs, this is not, in principle, distribution under the same terms.


Kent