[PD] a little ot: creative commons

[padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk]

>Writing your own licenses makes enforcement even more expensive that  
>enforcing a CC license since there wouldn't be any precedents or body  
>of knowledge pertaining to that license.
>
>It comes down to this: if someone with a lot more money that you  
>wants to violate your CC license, they probably can and will without  
>much hassle to them.  The GNU GPL is a different story, nobody has  
>even tried to fight the GNU GPL, even large corporations because they  
>would have no case against Eben Moglen in court.
>

I do agree with this. The real politic, the sociological context - and I don't want to get drawn to far here - is that the law is useless anyway, it's a rich mans tool. I believe what you are suggesting is that one runs with the biggest crowd, safety in numbers and all that. 

>Even worse, CC licenses add a cost to the small people that most  
>people are trying to encourage.  If someone is just starting out and  
>they want to sample a song, they have to spend a fair amount of  
>effort figuring out all the CC clauses and what they allow someone to  
>do.  This is non-trivial, especially since there are so many possible  
>clauses.  This is a real cost that mostly affects the small guy.

This was my point on writing your own clauses. Not to protect the work,
which we have established is a lottery, but to inform the user in simple language. I'll try to be honest here - "contract law" is bullshit, it's a failed attempt to convert natural language into formal system. You can view the court as a compiler, but there is no one standard compiler and what will parse and what won't parse, well you may as well throw dice. But there isn't a single aim to a contract, as in the modern 'corporate' context it is to cover asses at all costs, but in a more old fashioned sense it serves as a communication between two parties, offer to treat, consideration, etc. I don't know the fine distinction between a licence and a contract, but you get my point I hope.

Writing it in plain english (I am an enthusiastic  supporter of the Plain English Campaign which seeks to expose, ridicule, and lobby against laughable corporate and legal language designed to obfuscate) allows this secondary, and I argue - more important - communication to take place.  

In other words one is writing for the other party, not the court.
Any good and reasonable court should take a supplemental summary of
the authors intention seriously.
   
>With the GNU GPL, its dead simple: do whatever you want with it as  
>long as you distribute any changes or additions also.  That's why I  
>have been thinking about releasing everything I do, music, sound  
>installations, whatever, under the GNU GPL.

And so raising many questions. What constitutes "source" of a musical work. All intermediate stages of processing? Every waveform as a separate file? 

I would love it if the GPL clearly covered media works where the data is music or video, or an interactive application. I don't believe this is possible, and that we must return to the spirit, not the letter of law. Because there is no legal distincion between data types, nor can there ever be. They are inferred  as much by use as they are implied by construction (Shannon), the very nub of information science. For example I take a copyrighted sound sample, subject it to a chain of analysis (hilbert transforms, dft, linear prediction and som clustering that magically allows me to extract implied melodies..blah blah.... is there a "relationship" between the input and output? Is one derived from the other any longer? Or is the only significant "intellectual input" the transformation algorithm itself? What if I allow an AI to pick the coefficients? We are entering a time where technological progress breaking down bounaries of data is making a nonsense of old fashioned, brittle legal definitions of intellectual property. I we cannot fully comprehend the ramifications of this as computer scientists then how the hell can we expect mere lawyers to ever get a meaningful grip on it all?

The real job of the lawyer is to return a "humanistic" element to the
process, to concentrate on INTENT of the parties involved and what is REASONABLE intent. Presently I don't think the GPL serves artists who wish to restrict, for good reasons, what happens to their work. Not Yet. Perhaps it will eventually take on board some of the utilities of CC, such as attribution (very important for artists) and non-derivation (again, something deep in the ego of the artistic mind and often hard to understand by coders who actively desire others build on their work)which make it attractive to artists.

damnit this subject always gets me on one. Time to watch the football.
Andy

>.hc
>
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> And, despite being a FLOSS advocate and avid FLOSS programmer  
>>> since many
>>> years,
>>> I take particular offense to this article:
>>>
>>> 	http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Freedoms-Standard-Advanced
>>>
>>> Mako Hill only wishes to extend the naive tautology of the word  
>>> "freedom",
>>> and
>>> knock CC for not having an ideology that is as simple and total as  
>>> the GPL.
>>>
>>> best -august.
>>>
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>>
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>If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the  
>problem.        - Eldridge Cleaver
>
>