Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf AT gwolf.org>]

drew Roberts dijo [Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 08:32:04PM -0500]:
> > > > That event could be anything clearly verifiable from the
> > > > outside (such as the author's death, but not as somebody else
> > > > mentioned on the list, the author receiving a given amount of money).
> > >
> > > Why not a certain amount of money? Surely something like a kickstarter
> > > project would allow for easy verification.
> >
> > Because it is not verifiable from the outside.
> >
> > I can clearly tell you if year 2015 has already arrived. I can also
> > look up and check whether an author is still alive. But I cannot
> > (independently) verify whether the author did collect $5000 in
> > royalties unless he explicitly publishes it.
> 
> Do you know how kickstarter works? From what I gather if you kick in and 
> you 
> get charged, you know he got all of his money. If enough people do not kick 
> in to get to the amount, the whole deal is off and no one gets charged and 
> the project creator gets nothing.
> 
> Now, for people who do not kick in, perhaps we need kickstarted to keep a 
> list 
> of successfully funded projects? Do they keep one now?

Right. However, this still bonds us to a specific entity, to a
specific way of checking. Some scenarios:

• What if an author distrusts Kickstarter?
  Yes, they could use a different service providing the same facility,
  but that would lead to CC licenses linking to an outside source of
  validation. 

• What if Kickstarter goes out of business?
  I have specified my work to be CC-BY-NC($5000-KickStarterID). Ten
  years pass. Kickstarter shuts down. So, how can anybody look up
  whether they have rights to my work?

• What if I don't have network access?
  This might not seem that much of a threat, but we cannot
  discriminate against people disconnected from the rest of the world
  (say, somebody in a country with very poor connectivity, or
  whatever). This is what we Debianers would call the "Desert Island
  Test". Can I fully use the license being completely disconnected
  from the rights holder?

> It is certainly not perfect in all cases as a date would be, but I think it 
> could be workable.
> 
> Especially if we want to view it as a bounty system or distributed 
> patronage 
> system. (And it is only in this light that I have any real favour for this 
> idea.)

I understand the merits behind this. However, I think this baroque
level of details should not be part of CC itself. Anyway, an author
can use Kickstarter and, if all goes well, republish the work (and put
it prominently in every place he has access to) under nonambiguous new
licensing terms.