Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 6:48 PM, Anthony <osm AT inbox.org> wrote:
> I just wanted to echo what Francesco said.  Especially when combined
> with the new termination clause, this puts CC licenses into the "try
> to avoid using" category.  I now know the DRM clause was already
> there, but I didn't realize it before reading the draft of 4.0.
>
> It's still not clear to me why permission to circumvent is not
> sufficient.  Under US law "to ‘circumvent a technological measure’
> means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or
> otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a
> technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner"

It's worth pointing out that the license is constructed so that these
requirements only apply to sharing works, so none of the past worrying
of "can I use the works on my iChains??" applies.

If the authors of a work wish to permit people to make derivatives and
distribute them locked down, they can of course do that.

The only cases where this comes into play is where a third party
is distributing a covered work under this license, in a form which has
its freedoms restricted by technical measures, _and_ where the
copyright holders do not approve of the activity.

Because the general effect of copyleft licenses is to forbid restrictions,
it's usually better to retain a longstanding restriction and leave
authors to work around it with additional grants as they feel
appropriate.  Without clear evidence
of authors widely using these workarounds, or the prohibition on DRM
lockdown causing actual
problems, such a change seems inadvisable to me.


> The phrase "without the authority of the copyright owner" is right
> there in the statute.

Outside of the fevered imaginations of lawyers, legislators, and
economists, the actual substance of the law is often fairly irrelevant
to how people behave.

DRM is a long-term existential threat to liberally licensed works:  the
friction we remove through persistently permissive licenses can
be trivially restored by software that denies access to those freedoms.
Often, especially in terms of the behavior of the general public,
Code forms more powerful de facto law than the actual law, and can
easily implement restrictions far more aggressive than even the most
over-reaching law any free nation would ever consider.

And unlike copyright-created restrictions, any of uncountably many
middlemen and 'platform' providers can be in the business of making
the usable content distribution channel freedom-impoverished, while
network effects can make these restrictions hard to escape.

The fact that technically sophisticated users can currently
(and perhaps forever) get around these restrictions is no more an
argument that they aren't a practical impediment to freedom than
the relative non-enforcement and utter ease of copyright infringement
is an argument that we don't need permissive licenses.

.