Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Anthony <osm AT inbox.org>]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell AT gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 8:57 AM, Anthony <osm AT inbox.org> wrote:
>> Yes, this is worth pointing out.  Through a quick look the restriction
>> appears to be "You may not restrict the ability of a recipient of the
>> Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient by the
>> terms of this Public License, including through the imposition of any
>> effective technological measures."
>>
>> Still, I think the question of "can I distribute the work using
>> https??" applies.
>
> I'm not sure how we can have a productive conversation starting from
> this kind of basic misunderstanding.
>
> There is simply nothing in the text of the license which I can see
> would allow someone to draw the conclusion that distributing content
> in HTTPS would be problematic.  Please help me understand how you're
> coming up with that— and perhaps we can hammer out some little tweak
> that prevents that kind of misunderstanding that we can suggest.

The quote is right there.  HTTPS is a technological measure.  I'm not
sure what "effective" means, so I don't know if HTTPS is "effective"
or not.

>> I'm not willing to wait for clear evidence of actual problems before
>
> But we have an increasing mass of evidence from past experience that
> there are no problems arising from the requirement. It's not proof,
> but it's still evidence.

First of all, 4.0 hasn't even been released yet.  And 4.0 has
different wording from 3.0, which has different wording from 2.0
(which Debian says is non-free due to the DRM language).

Secondly, I don't see any evidence that there are no problems with the
current language.  Perhaps you would point me to some of it.

>>  I'll take on the latter, and say that I *wish* DRM actually worked.
>
> There is an asymmetry here that often confuses these discussions. For
> DRM to facilitate ecash, it would have to defend completely against
> the sum of all attackers over all time who would get enormous benefits
> from a successful attack.  For DRM to improve profits for a middleman
> or for it to inhibit user freedom, it only has to be effective against
> some people some of the time, who would realize much smaller benefits
> from getting around it.

I don't agree with this at all.  All it takes is one person to decrypt
the work and put it online, and the DRM is defeated.  At that point
plain old copyright law takes over, and in the case of a CC work, the
CC license continues to apply.

Now there is another aspect of DRM which might make things a bit
harder - devices which refuse to run/display content which isn't
signed/encrypted.  But this aspect is not relevant to the provisions
we are discussing.

> The latter is a far lower bar, and really is
> effective in practice: it prevents my mother from copying ebooks
> (including the kinds of copying which would be fair use!), and though
> there are cracking tools she'd be foolish to use them because she's
> not technically sophisticated enough to reliably find ones which are
> not malware-laden.

But she doesn't have to crack them herself.  All she has to do is
download one that someone else has cracked.

> (Fortunately, ecash— even various anonymous kinds— is possible without
> DRM, but that's far offtopic. :) )

Since it's offtopic I'll leave my response as "I disagree".