Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf AT gwolf.org>]

drew Roberts dijo [Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 01:28:28PM -0500]:
> (...)
> > On the philosophical point, if the GPL can already be used for any 
> > creative
> > works, then there is no need for a CC license doing the same thing.
> 
> There is a need for all copyleft Free works to be mixable. It may not be 
> possible. It likely isn't possible in all cases, but it is needed.

There are ways to ship them together without making them into one
indivisible work.

If you want your work to be able to be mixed into a GPL project,
either you or the other project's authors would have to (at least)
dual-license.

However, you *can* (and it's done quite often) ship i.e. a tarball
including GPLed files, CC-BY-SAed files, and so on.

> > The 
> > claim that a truly free work must come with the source is thus not 
> > relevant
> > to the question of how the CC licenses should be revised.
> 
> This statement can't really be evaluated properly until we can properly 
> define 
> source for all cases. So far, I have seen no serious attempts to do this.

Ok. What would you define as the source for the "Metropolis" movie? I
don't think it has a source. It is an intellectual/artistic work set
in long-term preservable media, it can be reproduced and archived. But
even having the script and the measures for all of the artwork used on
the set, no matter what, you will not be able to recreate it. 

Same thing for Picasso's Guernica — Would we need yet another
slaughtered village to lead to its creation? Thankfully no. Does
slaughting a village lead to the creation of a Guernica? Clearly
no. What is the source for the painting? The painting has no source:
The painting is an expression, and that's what it is.

Our creative brains are not finite-state machines. We, as humans, are
not fed a series of inputs to produce a predictably equivalent
output. Source, thus, has no meaning in many creative situations.

> (...)
> I don't buy this and I think it may be a dangerous argument. If I release a 
> program I wrote in binary form and do not release the source but put the 
> program under the GPL, it is under the GPL. Since no one else holds 
> copyrights to the program, no one can force me to give them source (perhaps 
> a 
> weakness of copyright law?) but they can make copies for themselves, they 
> can 
> rewrite it and release that source when they distribute the new executable.

No, sorry, you are wrong here. If you are the author, of course, you
are free to do as you wish. Give me your binaries licensed under the
GPL. However, I cannot redistribute them - As for the creation of the
binaries (in a computer programming environment) there *is* the need
of a source code. And if I don't have the source code (for your
program), I cannot comply with your licensing conditions (distribute
the binaries together with the sources). You can of course give it to
me, as it is your right as the copyright holder, but I cannot further
redistribute it.

>