Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 11:43 PM, David Chart <bydosa AT davidchart.com> wrote:
> If the license is not supposed to be a political tool in this way, I fail 
> to see how prohibiting a certain form of distribution increases anyone's 
> freedom. If you were allowed to distribute DRM-encumbered versions without 
> a parallel version, that would, obviously, be a problem. However, no-one is 
> suggesting that.

People are, in fact, suggesting that— see Anthony's post in this thread.

In any case you're mistaking it as a political tool.  A copyleft
license shouldn't permit a party to create versions of the work that
downstream users (including the original author themselves) couldn't
create/modify/redistribute/sell/etc.   They should not be able to add
additional encumbrances to the work which give them a privileged legal
position to control the work or derivatives.

This is the essential social/economic tradeoff of copyleft and if any
copyleft license is to perform its function then it must not allow it
to be mooted through any means which it can reasonable control.  You
should not be able to moot the copyleft through trademark, through
addtional copyright restrictions, through DRM, through external "Terms
Of Service", through patent encumbrance, etc.

Otherwise people will simply just moot it in these ways, as it's the
person trying to subvert the licensing who gets to choose the
technique they use... and we would have been better off without a
copyleft license at all: better to avoid the transactional costs of
preserving freedom if freedom won't be preserved.

I really don't care if other people use DRM for their commercial
publications. I just don't buy or partake of those works.  I do care
when DRM can be use to cheat the intent of my licensing by removing
freedoms I mandated and I do care when DRM prevents me from publishing
modifications of my own works, instead forcing me through a middleman
tax collector.

If you create a Bluray version of my copylefted movie— adding a bunch
of menus and navigation tools, then offering it up for sale, the fact
that you've made available a 'decrypted' copy of it via some obscure
website will do little for the freedom of the recipients of the Bluray
disks you create— and nothing for me as a downsteam creator because
the mandatory AACS DRM on bluray doesn't allow me to create modified
versions. Especially since in many places these locking schemes carry
the force of law (e.g. in the US under the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act).