Re: Using CC for Software?

Responding to my part:

On 5/27/02 7:24 PM, "Joseph Reagle" <reagle@mit.edu> wrote:

> Aaron and Larry,
> 
> Thank you for your answers! Some follow-up questions are below which don't
> require immediate answers; they're the sort of questions I've had in my
> mind while trying to understand the direction of CC.
> 
> On Thursday 23 May 2002 01:31 am, Lessig wrote:
>> the aim on this round was not to get into the proliferation game, by
>> creating our own licenses. I am eager, however, that we do develop marks
>> for standard licenses -- GPL, apache, etc. Then we're just expressing
>> other standard licenses, and increasing the pressure towards convergence.
>> That is certainly in our near-term plans.
> 
> One of the things I've been wondering is to what degree would this be used
> as self-labels and third-party labels (harkening back to the PICS days) .
> For instance, I might want the ability to self describe the license for my
> content, and other organizations might want to say this is "OSI certified"
> or "GPL compatible."

As it is a license, it is only self-labeling, though the meaning of the self
label may eventually be to link to an expression of another's contract.

> 
> On Tuesday 21 May 2002 01:16 pm, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>> I'm hoping to expand the characteristics (like copyleft, etc.) so that
>> we can describe other licenses like the GNU GPL or the EFF OAL. Building
>> something like Zooko's Quick Reference[1] from the RDF data is an
>> interesting place to go. So if one were to say that MIT-style licenses
>> were those that only required attribution and no warranty, then they'd
>> be easy to categorize.
> 
> Yes, this would be nifty.
> 
>> Yep. While I doubt that our web site will be able to do that kind of
>> thing, it should certainly lay the framework for others who are
>> interested.
> 
> Question, when I register my content [1] at your site will I have to send a
> URI for every single Web page? Can I specifiy domains such as already done
> in P3P [2] (and other applications?) (Also, it'd be neat if I could feed it
> RSS so new content is fed to CC automatically!)
> 
> [1] http://www.creativecommons.org/technology/contributor.html
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/#ref_file_processing
> 
>> Others can probably explain a little better why software was excluded.
>> Reasons I've heard are:
>> 
>>   - a lot of work has already gone into software, and so we should focus
>> on the more neglected stuff
> 
> I'd think one could take advantage of the work.
> 
>>   - software, by its nature of practicality, has a lot of issues that
>> other content doesn't. When was the last time you bought a CD that had a
>> shrinkwrap license disclaiming warranty?
> 
> Is it the (Red book non-compliant) "copy protected" CDs that have been
> known to crash computers? <smile/> Regardless, even if for natural language
> content that is technical there is often a disclaimer [3].
> 
> [3] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice-20000612#Legal_Disclaimer
> 
>> Anyway, I hope this answers some of your questions. Thanks for your
>> interest in the project and your letter.
> 
> Some other questions I have specific to your license include questions I've
> encountered at the W3C including: the right of translation, annotation,
> reformatting (e.g., html -> pdf), the right/authenticity of the submitter
> to assign the work under the stated license (is CC negligent/liable if
> abused?), and will you version the license so you can introduce a debugged
> one in the future, if so, is content under the old licenses also available
> under the new license (e.g., GPL).
> 


-----
Lessig
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    <http://eldred.cc>

Received on Saturday, 1 June 2002 14:25:11 UTC