On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Chris Zielinski wrote: > As the former head of an authors' collecting society, to me Lessig's > Creative Commons project looks like nothing more than applying copyright > in a collecting society model for digital rights management. > > For example, the licensing options/protections mentioned among the > Creative Commons plans (the descriptive article is at > http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/02/11/ > creatcom.DTL) sound very familiar: "work not to be altered, employed for > commercial purposes, or used without proper attribution" - the first and > last are conventional moral rights, while the middle one is a right > enshrined in copyright. > > It seems that the licenses proposed envisage permitting commercial > transactions: > > "An artist might...agree to give away a work as long as no one is making > money on it but include a provisions for requiring payments on a sliding > scale if it's sold." > > Well, yes - if no-one wants to buy it you give it away with expressions > of chaste virtue, but as soon as there is a rustle of the readies you > adjust your stockings. Consider what happens when you replace the word > "artist" in that sentence by "academic researcher", and you see where > this is taking us (this would be an artists/authors' collecting society > position, in fact). > > The other aspects - the bolt-on licences, the machine-readable licensing > tag, the "conservancy" role (="let us manage your content") - also all > seem the stuff of modern collective licensing, which is already being > carried out for rightsholders of all kinds throughout the world. > > Any other takes on the originality of the Creative Commons?
None of it makes the slightest bit of sense unless one makes a clear distinction between work that IS and IS NOT an author give-away. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1 Stevan Harnad
