On Mar 20, 2005, at 00:58, Per Eric Rosén wrote:
Could it be like this: if you give someone the work in a form (not
preferred for editing|not allowing you to exec your rights in this
licence), you shall also give them the unrestricted work, or a written
offer valid for at least 3 years? I mean; isn't this very analogous to
the
situation of binary (crippled form) vs. source, that GPL already
adresses?
Could a similiar language help perhaps?
I think it is in the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses not to
require a transparent copy for editing. This non-requirement makes it
easy to apply a Creative Commons license to any work. Suppose a
hobbyist distributes his/her musical work online as an MP3 file. Having
to provide the tracks as separate uncompressed audio channels would be
a serious deterrent for publishing under a CC license at all.
Therefore, I think it would be wrong to fix the Creative Commons
licenses by smuggling in a requirement for transparent copy in a
license update. However, I think it would make sense to introduce a new
license element called Source or src that could be appended to any
license that contains the ShareAlike element (eg. CC-by-sa-src).
I think the crux of the anti-DRM clause is the *legality* of exercising
the right given by the license--not the technical ease. That is, as
long as a possessing and operating a photocopier or a scanner and a
piece of OCR software is not as such illegal, it should be permissible
to provide someone with only a printed copy of a literary work licensed
under Creative Commons license. On the other hand, providing someone
with only a CSS-scrambled DVD of a Creative Commons-licensed work
should not be OK.
To give an even more glaring example: Distributing a literary work as a
PDF where all the text has been converted to vector graphics should be
permissible, but distributing the literary work as a PDF where all the
/ToUnicode tables are in place but the do not print and do not
extract text the flags have been set should not be permitted. In the
latter case, extracting the text is technically easier. That is not the
point. The point is that misguided legislation could ban the possession
of software that does not of honor the DRM flags.
I think the anti-DRM (or rather anti-anti-circumvention) clause should
make the point that:
You do not have to provide a copy of the Work or the Derivative Work to
everyone, but when you do provide a copy to someone, you must not take
measures the circumvention of which would be both illegal in the
supported jurisdictions and required for exercising the rights given by
the license, unless you also simultaneously provide a copy without such
measures.
There is no politically correct way of defining supported
jurisdictions, but it should include the jurisdictions with iCommons
licenses and should probably not include North Korea.
--
Henri Sivonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
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