Cc-uk mailing list

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

On 21 Dec 2005, at 10:08, David Hirst .com wrote:
> An interesting and relevant piece about the incompatibilities  
> across licences.
>
> http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16073,300,p1.html?trk=nl
I am very concerned by CC-US's current "compatibility" drive. It  
undermines their licenses' trustworthiness. If BY-SA can be  
arbitrarily modified to give derivatives to whichever large projects  
refuse to use BY-SA (which given this will be all of them) it is a  
moving target, an unknown quantity.

What happens when News Corp. draft a copyleft license with added  
advertising (because otherwise copyleft stops people making money,  
Lessig has shown that)? What happens when Microsoft draft a copyleft  
license locked to Windows (because otherwise peoples copyleft rights  
won't be respected)? CC-US will put a backdoor in BY-SA and add them  
to their meta-license. What happens when I draft Redundant Minor  
Copyleft License V0.1? If it's not treated the same as the FAL I'll  
want to know why.

Far from solving the problem of a fragmented commons, CC-US will  
contribute to it by driving work to minor or unsuitable licenses.  
Instead, CC-US should engage in public criticism of the software  
manual license that allows political opinions to be attached (FDL)  
used by Wikipedia and the NonCommercial landlocked license (CA) used  
by the BBC. They should make legal, procedural and software tools to  
aid transition to a more suitable license (BY-SA).

The great and good cutting deals in smoke filled rooms is not a  
substitute for this.

If Lessig doesn't want to "bully" license users and has a new-found  
respect for people's choice of license, he should start with the  
users of his own licenses.

- Rob.