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There are already good projects working on this license! Just take a look at iRATE. (They even do mention our efforts at their blog).

"5 February 2004 Perth, Western Australia

New Zealander Anthony Jones announced the third minor release of the iRATE radio client today. iRATE radio provides users with a powerful new way to find and download free, legal music online. Users rate tracks based on their tastes. The iRATE server then selects other tracks to send to the user from a database of over 50,000 freely downloadable songs by correlating the user's ratings with other users and finding people with similar tastes.

Unlike streaming audio, iRATE saves the tracks to the user's hard drive. This means that playback is smoother, without the typical problems associated with streaming media, such as high bandwidth usage.

iRATE radio is written in Java, and is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Windows users can easily get up and running with iRATE radio using Sun's Java Web Start and Internet Explorer. For other browsers on Windows and Linux, users may need to download and install Java WebStart separately. There are also native Debian, Mandrake, and Redhat Linux packages available. Mac users will be pleased to hear that a disk image (.DMG) file for OS X will be released within a week.

This release features a new, more intuitive user interface, a refined track selection algorithm, and better download performance. Other improvements include a new icon (following the recent icon contest), tool tips, ID3 tag display, artist's website link support, playlist management, and many others.

Since the project's registration at SourceForge in March 2003, iRATE radio has gathered an increasing number of developers. The user base now numbers over 8,000 individuals. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. Jones recently made an announcement to the development mailing list detailing thirteen focus areas for improvement. These included translations, native playback (for improved decoding performance), better server-side track selection, multimedia key binding support, audio prompting, more publicity, and several others.

The iRATE radio website is at http://irate.sourceforge.net/"

LINKing to RDF is an option, but there are reasons it isn't CC's recommended method. See http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/ext end#html.

I seem to recall in the past that Creative Commons had some problems with the GPL and its ilk in the past due to its somewhat viral nature.

Hmmm...

I seemto recall that the only propblem the Creative Commons people had with the GPL was that it was to specific to acheive what they were attempting to acheive. Which is why the Creative Commons does not promote only a single license, but a full spectrum of licenses that are only as limiting or as "viral" as the copyright holder whishes them to be. There is a Creative Commons "Share Alike" license that is very much similar to the GPL.

Exactly. BTW, check out the Creative Commons tech challenges page. We'd like (many) more folks to build applications like Verify -- but that's just one of many application ideas.

Look at the different outputs in page 2 of the license generator:
- Human readable
- Lawyer readable
- Machine readable

Good to know lawyers aren't humans, i was starting to worry :P

But when I submitted it to Kuro5hin, the preview showed the RDF meta data literally (visibly) in the text, I think to indicate that Scoop was rejecting it. That is, Kuro5hin didn't accept HTML comments in the markup.

Also, Creative Commons advises posting the Some Rights Reserved image as the license notice, but I couldn't do that because kuro5hin (very sensibly) doesn't allow images. That's why I posted the license notice at the end of the article the way CC says to do for a text file.

Now, I'm sure Scoop could be updated to allow RDF, but how many online communities are there, and how many will need their software updated?

CC RDF metadata can include fields for name of author, name of copyright holder, and the name of the work. The Creative Commons page on embedding license information in non-web files covers how validating the license would work.

You embed a link to a web page into the license data; the web page confirms the embedded license data. If the license link is not there, or the license data at the webpage and the embedded license data don't match, then it does not validate; a good agent would notify you of this, and perhaps even not let you download the non-validating files.

Yes, you could put up a fraudulent site with fraudulent license data. But that's like saying "selling used cars isn't practical, because I could steal a car and forge the registration." There's a reason fraud is a crime...

A community that wants to encourage distribution of legitimate works would not let a fraudulent site stay up for long once discovered, which would break the validation chain. And that is the community this system is designed to serve.

Jay (=

This problem has already been solved by the CC people, who thought of it when the issue of adding metadata to music came up.

So there's no problem, with MP3s at least.

Well, their comic "A Spectrum of Rights" explains it better than I can, but in brief, you have several licensing options:

• Are you required to give attribution to the author?
• Is commercial distribution allowed, or non-commercial distribution only?
• Are derivative works allowed, or must the work be distributed as provided?
• Are derivative works allowed to be relicensed, or must they be distributed under the same terms as the work being derived from?
• For the GPL and LGPL metadata, they added options for "Make source code available" and "Preserve copyright and licensing notices"; those are not necessarily appropriate for an MP3 file or a text file, and don't seem to be available from the license generator.

Those first four options can be combined to form eleven different licensing combinations, and the CC website will generate the necessary metadata and provide you with links to the "human-readable" (heh) and legal license documentation. The GPL would probably be considered similar to the Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The important thing to remember is Creative Commons is not a license, it's a spectrum of licenses that can be tailored to your needs. And remember, you can always contact the author and work out a better deal if their license doesn't work for you.

Jay (=

Well, their comic "A Spectrum of Rights" explains it better than I can, but in brief, you have several licensing options:

• Are you required to give attribution to the author?
• Is commercial distribution allowed, or non-commercial distribution only?
• Are derivative works allowed, or must the work be distributed as provided?
• Are derivative works allowed to be relicensed, or must they be distributed under the same terms as the work being derived from?
• For the GPL and LGPL metadata, they added options for "Make source code available" and "Preserve copyright and licensing notices"; those are not necessarily appropriate for an MP3 file or a text file, and don't seem to be available from the license generator.

Those first four options can be combined to form eleven different licensing combinations, and the CC website will generate the necessary metadata and provide you with links to the "human-readable" (heh) and legal license documentation. The GPL would probably be considered similar to the Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The important thing to remember is Creative Commons is not a license, it's a spectrum of licenses that can be tailored to your needs. And remember, you can always contact the author and work out a better deal if their license doesn't work for you.

Jay (=

The main Creative Commons licenses are based on the three questions on this page.

Basically, a CC license could require attribution or not, allow commerical use or not, and allow modification or not allow modification or allow modification only if licensed under the same CC license. It's very flexible, and easy to express in 3 icons which options have been selected.

Back in the day(tm), I had an obscenely long TOS/copyright written on my personal website written mostly because I have/had a weird sense of humor and boredom was a strong contributing factor.

Anyways, at the very end of it all was a simple line that summed it all up:

Your mother taught you better than to steal.

Despite the irony in me lifting that line from a friend's site, I do find it kind of sad that there's a complete mutual nature of distrust in such a wide variety of websites between the visitor and webmaster. To that end, I'm glad we have saving graces like Creative Commons and other such "free" canned licenses.

Yet another reason to flood the sharing networks with legally sharable documents using a Creative Commons license.

Let people distribute copies of your whole work for noncommercial purposes (for example, on a file-sharing network, or among friends)?

http://creativecommons.org/license/sampling

Sorry to say but this whole licensing scheme is getting out of hand. Not to troll about this but how many licenses are there? GPL, BSD, etc? Now another scheme? Now supposing I decided as an admin on one of the machines I -obviously ADMIN - I decide to go with the "non commercial" license. Say I run my own machine with 60 users. Friends, friends of friends, etc. Now I decide to host a domain for one of these friends, and he decides he's going to run something commercial then what? Am I breaking license standards here. Aside from that, what the hell difference would it honestly make these so called Licenses being they would have to be a worldwide universal license.

Just because you say it's law here, why should someone follow the laws of land A when they live in land B. Don't you think there is a huge window for abuse here. Not only by cheapskate corporations who can circumvent these laws, but by lawmakers who for one wouldn't understand computing as a whole, but would be quick to indict Average John for a quick hit in the paper on "How I cracked down on international program crackers who acted with disregard those terrorists."

Seriously, why is the community (Open Source) even waisting their time on another licensing scheme.

AmeriCONNED the Beautiful

Let people distribute copies of your whole work for noncommercial purposes (for example, on a file-sharing network, or among friends)?

http://creativecommons.org/license/sampling

Sorry to say but this whole licensing scheme is getting out of hand. Not to troll about this but how many licenses are there? GPL, BSD, etc? Now another scheme? Now supposing I decided as an admin on one of the machines I -obviously ADMIN - I decide to go with the "non commercial" license. Say I run my own machine with 60 users. Friends, friends of friends, etc. Now I decide to host a domain for one of these friends, and he decides he's going to run something commercial then what? Am I breaking license standards here. Aside from that, what the hell difference would it honestly make these so called Licenses being they would have to be a worldwide universal license.

Just because you say it's law here, why should someone follow the laws of land A when they live in land B. Don't you think there is a huge window for abuse here. Not only by cheapskate corporations who can circumvent these laws, but by lawmakers who for one wouldn't understand computing as a whole, but would be quick to indict Average John for a quick hit in the paper on "How I cracked down on international program crackers who acted with disregard those terrorists."

Seriously, why is the community (Open Source) even waisting their time on another licensing scheme.

Lessig and Doctorow both work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're two of my heroes.

Lessig loves creative use of the Creative Commons license, so he probably enjoyed the Fluffy Kittens remix of Alice in Wonderland, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Eastern Standard Tribe. These derivative works were made with Doctorow's permission.

And that balance has been broken for quite a while now in the "IP Owners'" favor, which is why so few people respect it.

It's not all doom and gloom, though - I'm running across more and more websites that proudly proclaim that their stuff is licensed more fairly under CreativeCommons (GPL-ish) licenses.

For someone to reject the status quo mindset of "All Rights Reserved! Perpetually MineMineMine!" in favor of the friendlier and more sustainable "Some Rights Reserved. Founding Fathers Were Right." gets a HUGE karma boost from me. That alone was enough to get me to purchase some framed prints from online artists.

This two-cent post is hereby placed in the public domain.

--

And that balance has been broken for quite a while now in the "IP Owners'" favor, which is why so few people respect it.

It's not all doom and gloom, though - I'm running across more and more websites that proudly proclaim that their stuff is licensed more fairly under CreativeCommons (GPL-ish) licenses.

For someone to reject the status quo mindset of "All Rights Reserved! Perpetually MineMineMine!" in favor of the friendlier and more sustainable "Some Rights Reserved. Founding Fathers Were Right." gets a HUGE karma boost from me. That alone was enough to get me to purchase some framed prints from online artists.

This two-cent post is hereby placed in the public domain.

--

I wonder if we'll see SCO-like attempts to quickly produce as many databases of as many facts as possible. Anyone using any facts whatsoever could be extorted for license fees or subject to lawsuits by rabid hordes of attorneys.

The bill is for copyright-like protections, not patent-like protections. The scenario you described above is more like a patented database situation - where the facts are protected regardless of their use (much as patents apply to alternate implementations of the same idea). Copyrights protect the "finished product" as it were, and not the "internals." In other words, you wouldn't be in violation by using facts from a database - only by making unlicensed copies of the original database.

But this underscores a serious problem with modern notions of "intellectual property." As MarkusQ said earlier today:

"(Our second big loss has been the "IP" fudge, which is blurring the distinctions between patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, competative advantages, wishful thinking, bull*, and marketing babble into one vague pile of lawyer poo)."

So what do we DO about all of this? I attended a lecture given by Lawrence Lessig at my university's law school last fall. He seemed rather pessimistic about the prospects of legal reform - going about making changes from within the system (mainly due to his defeat in Elred Vs. Ashcroft). He spoke quite a bit about his work on the Creative Commons, and his views on the "Some Rights Reserved" middle ground. I think he's right, for the time being. The system is failing in many ways to serve the good of the people. Contributing to a copyleft commons is an important way to stand up for freedom of information, whether your contribution is sotware, music, the Creative Commons Logo rendered in SVG, ad infinitum.

I was startled by one point that he made, mainly because I had recently been thinking along the same lines. My version is here. The point is that the trend of increased scope an enforcement of intellectual property has the potential to create a new feudal system based on the perpetual ownership of information and ideas. The old European feudal system was based on perpetual ownership of land. The implications of such a system for those who are left out of the ownership are easy to see, and are well-documented in the pages of history. There is a reason those years are known as "The Dark Ages."

This is actually about copyrighted content that authors wish to control .. not "copyright" simply as such. That's why the Creative Commons Project is so important.

I was thinking the same thing. If I submit my paper under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 Licence, then it can be read by whomever, and checked for plagurism, but cannot be included in the database for future financial gain on their part. If they ignore it, they are in breach of the license, and I can sue them for money they have made since my paper was added to the database.

Stallman asserts that "non-free software carries with it an antisocial system that prohibits coopoeration and community." This is MOST certainly overstating the importance of software's influence on each person's ability to cooperate and experience community. And I assert that this is where the open source movement fails. While open source software promotes cooperation and community for the developers involved in its creation, it doesn't attempt to build community by creating more user friendly tools. The general popluation doesn't care about the right to see the source code, most of the users of computers can't do any thing with the code any way. Open source project managers and developers need to better consider their end users. End users are not always other programmers, some are teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, housewives, grandparents. Usability must extend into high quality instructional programs that provide the information at the user's fingertips. Job aids and other electronic performance support tools that address the needs of the non-developer community will do more to foster cooperation and community between the developers and their users. After all what good is any application free or not without a high probability of end user acceptance?

No he's right, one hundred million percent right, yes we could have wider community, involving the wider community of FOSS users, but the FOSS documentation movement, addresses this, as does the EFF, GrokLaw, Creative Commons and many, many more, if you know of another hole in the community, well start organising and fill it.

In any case RMS is right the FOSS developers freedom, is the necessary basis of the freedom, for every one else, unless the developers have this freedom, all the other freedoms are stifled.

Nobody actually uses ASCII any more. It's not adquate for internationalizable applications. It only contains a simple non-accented Latin alphabet, arabic numerals, space, and 33 other characters. Oh, and 33 non-graphic control characters, only 2 of which are relatively safe to use in text files and streams. That's just not enough for any application that isn't specific to the U.S.

You say you use ASCII every day? No you don't. You probably use some variation of Latin 1 and/or UTF-8. Both have the same values as ASCII for their first 127 characters, so the difference is usually transparent. Not always.

Now you're saying, "All right, ASCII, Latin 1, whatever. What I mean is plain text. That's the universal format." No it's not. There isn't even a single Latin 1. Aside from ISO Latin 1 (which is supposed to be the default for web pages, but no widely-used browser makes that assumption), there's Microsoft Latin 1 and Macintosh Latin. Add in UTF-8 (which Slashdot supposedly uses, though most of their pages actually use ISO Latin1), and you have four different "plain text" encodings in wide use. The results when files are shared between these platforms are often pretty gross. And these are just the encodings used in the Americas and Western Europe!

Even if there was a text encoding that absolutely everybody used, you wouldn't want to store all your books in it. You're throwing away too much data! That's why I gave up on Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders. When I downloaded a Gutenberg text, things like italics and boldface all appeared at ALLCAPS. VERY VERY IRRITATING! And when I helped proof DP's text scans, I wasn't given any proper way to enter to record all the subtle typography that was in those old texts. One particular omission was the absence of any clear separation between encylopedia articles. I found this particularly frustrating, because I joined DP to help bring the classic Britannica 11th Edition online. What's the point if you can't browse individual articles easily, or the Greek words are a mess, etc., etc.

What's the solution? Not HTML -- it's not general enough. Somebody needs to sit down and design a markup (probably an XML document type) that expresses the stuff you find in various kinds of books. I doubt of if this "Open EBook" thing will do, because it will have very narrow objectives -- find a way to distribute the next Steven King with proper DRM support. Not interesting to those of us who want to share a lot of public domain and Creative Commons stuff, and are mainly concerned with preserving the original character of the text. Maybe when I know more about writing DTDs and Schemas, I'll take a stab.

But doesn't that create files that aren't accesible to a lot of people? No, because you don't distribute the XML version isn't for distribution (except to those who really want it). Mostly you transform the XML into formats suitable for distribution: HTML, WML, ebook formats, and yes, "plain text".

It's also worth noting that Bob Young founded the Center for the Public Domain, which is among other things partly responsible for iBiblio, Creative Commons and the Eldred v. Ashcroft case (which McBride directly attacks in his letter).

Was it created within the last 70something years?

If the answer to that question is "yes" then there is a very good chance that the file is copyrighted. A creator has a copyright on his/her creation the moment it is created, whether he/she chooses to register the copyright or not (though registering the copyright makes it easier to defend against infringement). That copyright lasts until the government says it expires (a period that is WAY too long in my opinion), or until the creator decides to put his/her creation into the public domain, whichever comes first.

I'm willing to bet almost everything out on all of the P2P networks is copyrighted. It is probably safest to assume that it is. So, now it is up to you the user to see if you are allowed to make use of the probably copyrighted content by doing some research on the creator to find out if he/she has granted a license (such as a Creative Commons License) for others to freely copy the work or perhaps has entered the creation into the public domain. If this is the case, then please, by all means, download the file. If not, then I recommend leaving it alone and certainly not distributing it unless you want to face a case of copyright infringement.

So, instead of having the **AA or whatever organization police you, how about policing yourself a little bit? Do some research and find out if you actually do have the right to copy the material. Contact the creator, ask for permission, look at their homepage, etc.

Disclaimer: I do NOT agree with the actions of the **AA and similar organizations, I think that the term for copyright is WAY too long (in fact, I am giving my own creations, mostly photographs, a maximum 20 year limit before I put them in the public domain), I think the laws need to be changed, and I think that the penalties for copyright infringement are WAY too severe. Also, use of the word "you" above is not necessarily referring to the parent poster, but to anyone that it applies to. No offense intended. Also also, at least, this is how I interpret copyright law...please please please correct me if I am wrong.

I am a content creator and I respect the copyrights of others just as I hope they respect my copyrights. If I want to give something away for free, then feel free to use it however you like, but if I choose to restrict the use of my creations then please respect that, and if you don't like it, create your own.

Just my humble opinion of course, however, it seems that many people think that "copyrighted" means "owned by the **AA/etc" when it means "owned by whoever created it for a limited time before being returned to the public domain" (at least, in my understanding...again, please correct me if I have misinterpreted "copyright")

cheers. :-)

Over the next 5-10 years, I predict that many laws will be completely rewritten to better accommodate the changes that the internet has brought upon society. Many of these changes will be for the better, and the end result will almost certainly be a more free and open society.

Alternative lisencing scemes have already been created, which are the copyright equivalent to the GPL. These alternative copyright systems will compete with full copyright instead of replaceing it. As more and more artists put their work into liberal lisencing scemes it will become harder for others to do business the old fashoned way. The fact that these alternative lisences exsist ensure the future of full copyright, because now producers and consumers have a choice. For this reason there will always be some content locked out of the public domain. Old fashoned copyright law will not change, but it's perseption and proliferation of use will.

Take the Microsoft anti-trust case for example. It's no coinsedence that the issue puttered out at the same time Linux was gaining in popularity. It seems that legal alternatives, (the GPL) and public action beat the government to the punch. For the most part, copyright will follow the same path.

Too bad that statement is at best misleading and at worst entirely false... note the "over the 20 years" part--the Founding Fathers never intended copyrights to last as long as they do now; it was supposed to be a limited grant, limited as in less than 30 years (and even that, only after an extension, for which the original copyright holder would still have to be alive).

Can you patent an idea and then release it into the public domain or put it under a Creative Commons license (or something like it)? It seems like this might head off some of the prior art arguements, and even if some other entity breaks the patent because of other prior art, it still is better than it moving into a single group's hands. I know it is more work, but I am tied of getting screwed-over because someone comes up with something "innovative*".

Just wondering....

* Innovative (MS, SCO, et. al definition) - scouring the world for ideas for which they can claim ownership.

It's openness has been without a strong de facto standard in interface design

What have you found wrong with the GNOME guidelines? Or do you mainly complain that too many high-profile apps do not conform, or that the competing KDE guidelines would confuse users too much?

it's installations are too open to user intervention.

I don't completely understand what you mean by this.

A cute label maker that Just Works with standard printers.

Provided the makers of label paper deign to cooperate by providing specifications of where the labels are placed on the page. However, too many printers are not "standard printers" in that they do not conform to a "standard" language such as PostScript or HP PCL; these non-standard printers need the cooperation of the manufacturer. In addition, "cute" implies clip art, and the free software community has found it rather hard to attract visual artists who are willing to free license their works under e.g. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.

A photo app that lets them just plug in a digicam and browse pictures

Again, provided the camera manufacturer deigns to cooperate.

or draw smiley faces on Cousin Bob without worrying about layers and opacity.

It's possible to edit an image in GIMP without creating a new layer, just as in Microsoft Paint.

Much like the academics on the pre-Mosaic internet, many Linux users tend to feel like people should have to know what 'root' privileges are to use a computer, as well as where the proper config files are and what a mount point is. (some go much further)

I agree that config files and mount points could be simplified as Mac OS X has, but I've found it rather easy to get people to understand the concept of superuser. Use an analogy between root and the head of the household.

We were living a dilemma here in Brazil, as our law doesn't recognize a contract written in a language other than Portuguese. On the other hand, the FSF would not recognize any translation of the GPL as official.

But now it does. As of yesterday, this article at creative commons talks about the very first official translation of the GPL into a language
other than English. (Full text of the CC-GPL in Brazillian Portuguese is here.)

The news I've read about it also say that there are some modifications to make the license valid according to brazillian laws, but I had no checked this so far.

We were living a dilemma here in Brazil, as our law doesn't recognize a contract written in a language other than Portuguese. On the other hand, the FSF would not recognize any translation of the GPL as official.

But now it does. As of yesterday, this article at creative commons talks about the very first official translation of the GPL into a language
other than English. (Full text of the CC-GPL in Brazillian Portuguese is here.)

The news I've read about it also say that there are some modifications to make the license valid according to brazillian laws, but I had no checked this so far.

Larry Lessig, Eldred counsel and all-around bad-ass, put aside his obligations for the morning on his visit to Japan to pen this response (typos retained for the grammar nerds):

More SCO fud, this time insulting the constitution

I apologize for the silence, but weve been in Japan this week announcing iCommons in Japan. (More on that soon). But after reading this extraordinary document by Darl McBride of SCO infamy, I could resist canceling this morning meetings to respond.

From the start of this pathetic lawsuit, Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation has argued that there was nothing behind the SCO claims. His arguments are persuasive. But if you want a clue of just how clueless this case is, consider the constitutional arguments made by SCO.

McBride's argument is grounded in the Constitution. (Well, close to the constitution. He quotes the text of the constitution to be:

Congress shall have Power [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, open-source advocates argue against copyright and patent laws, and whatever measures they take to by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Actually, the framers didn't say anything about "open source advocates.")

As he rightly is argues, the Constitution requires that Congress only grant copyrights where those copyrights "promote the Progress of Science." Thus, if Congress granted copyrights in a context where they didn't "promote progress" one might well ask whether such a law was constitutional (e.g., a law that extended the terms of existing copyrights, but let's leave that aside for the moment).

But the key move in the McBride-FUD is his claim that proponents of free software and open source software are somehow against copyright.

He claims that "GPL is exactly opposite in its effect from the 'copyright' laws adopted by the US Congress and the European Union"; that "Red Hat has aggressively lobbied Congress to eliminate software patents and copyrights"; that "the issue is clear: do you support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the European Union, or do you support "free" - as in free from ownership - intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others?"; that "SCO argues that the authority of Congress under the U.S. Constitution to "promote the Progress of Science and the useful arts" inherently includes a profit motive, and that protection for this profit motive includes a Constitutional dimension"; and that "We believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced by vigorously protecting the right of authors and inventors to earn a profit from their work."

Let's take each of these claims in turn:

"GPL is exactly opposite in its effect from the 'copyright' laws adopted by the US Congress and the European Union"

Despite RMS's aversion to the term, the GPL trades on a property right that the laws of the US and EU grant "authors" for their creative work. A property right means that the owner of the right has the right to do with his property whatever he wishes, consistent with the laws of the land. If he chooses to give his property away, that does not make it any less a property right. If he chooses to sell it for $1,000,000, that doesn't make it any less a property right. And if he chooses to license it on the condition that source code be made free, that doesn't make it

Oops, he's been dead for thirty years. Probably isn't going to be writing another book set in Middle Earth I guess.

The Hobbit was published in 1937. I think 66 years is plenty of time to recoop the his effort. I appreciate the intent of allowing copyright to pass on to one's heirs, but it's been 30 years since Tolkien died. Can't Christopher Tolkien create something of value himself to provide for himself? Heck, he's got to be doing well, and at 77 maybe it's time to retire and let the rest of the world enjoy a work you didn't actually create!

The Founder's Copyright still covers 99% of the potential value of copyrighted works and manages to do it without putting culture under chains.

Good stuff, the more areas of human activity that the free software way of producing things spreads to the better, another science thing is featured on the front page of Creative Commons at the moment, PLoS:

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Science and education seem to be areas where this is taking off at the moment, the design of things seems to be happening at a lot slower rate. Perhaps the lack of free CAD software to compete with AutoCAD is one of the main things holding this back?

I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy a washing machine and vacuum cleaner that are build from designs under GPL style licences...

Doesn't the FSF deny people the right to copy and distribute software, unless they agree to the GPL?

No.

OK. So I can distribute linux binaries without distributing the source, then?

As long as there is copyright on software, there is a need for the GPL.

No, as long as there is copyright, there is a need for copyleft. The GPL is a half-decent incarnation of copyleft, but it denies people the right to copy annd distribute software without copying and distributing source code unlike other copyleft licenses, such as the QingPL or ShareAlike 1.0.

The FSF doesn't deny anyone anything.

Every time they threaten someone with a lawsuit they deny them something.

This is important because without the GPL I could very well have my work stolen in the traditional sense. Example: I write a foo processor called FooFu-- and release it as public domain. Bar, Inc. takes my freely shared source and creates a competing software called Footsy, but refuses to release source code. Any attempt on my part, even though I am the original author, to use their derived work would violate federal copyright law. So what the GPL does is make it possible for me to share my work without my having to worry about it being taken this way.

Yes, the GPL does prevent that. But so does a completely proprietary license. And so does so does the Creative Commons Share Alike license. Between the three, I like the Share Alike license the best. Only the Share Alike license allows you to copy and distribute software without restriction.

You can read about the variety of options available in the creative commons licenses at the Creative Commons website

Essentially it's a templated license where the owner selects what terms to use.the options are:

1. Require attribution?
   • yes
   • no
2. Allow commercial uses of your work?
   • yes
   • no
3. Allow modifications of your work?
   • yes
   • Yes, as long as others share alike
   • no

So essentially it boils down to:

• Public Domain
• Public Domain with attribution
• GPL
• BSD
• Freeware

(3) Prizes: One (1) First Prize: First Prize Winner may choose either: an Apple(R) Power Mac(R) G5 Computer (Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5) (Approximate retail value ("ARV"): US$3000), or an Alienware(R) 2001DV(TM) System (ARV: US$3000). One (1) Second Prize: Sony(R) Handycam(R) Camcorder (Model DCR-PC120BT) (ARV: US$1200). One (1) Third Prize: Apple(R) iPod(TM) Digital Music Player (ARV: US$400).

(3) Prizes: One (1) First Prize: First Prize Winner may choose either: an Apple(R) Power Mac(R) G5 Computer (Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5) (Approximate retail value ("ARV"): US$3000), or an Alienware(R) 2001DV(TM) System (ARV: US$3000). One (1) Second Prize: Sony(R) Handycam(R) Camcorder (Model DCR-PC120BT) (ARV: US$1200). One (1) Third Prize: Apple(R) iPod(TM) Digital Music Player (ARV: US$400).

In real life you often get to personally meet those starving artists when you buy their wares or pay for performances; there's a real emotional connection there - not so online (usually). In Real Life you get a feelgood for supporting local artists, and you get a more meaningful "Thank You" when handing over your cash - online it's more antiseptic.

I would be 100 times more likely to pay for really great online content if:

1. I was recognized as more than a number (or a /. '*') for my contribution.
2. I had some idea of the artist's bottom line so I knew how badly they needed it vs. some other artist who's just as worthy but not as arbitrarily popular/rich. Call it an OpenBottomline, kind of like this. I don't like sending my money down paypal blackholes.
3. The content was released under a more open license that allows everyone to stand on others' shoulders, rather than the default Disney "AllMineMineMine!" copyright.
4. If there was some easy mechanism to pool my money with others to finance the creation of works we want.

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Here are a few good representatives to mention if you want someone to debate on intellectual property issues:

Bruce Perens, former Debian project leader.

Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Chair of the Creative Commons project, author of several books on intellectual property...

and,
you. Seriously. You are the best person to represent your own views. Then we know what you think. Just make sure that you know who you are speaking for - I am sure you can represent your views well, but I don't know if you represent my views very well.

If you want someone more local, start asking librarians at the local library if any of them have viewpoints on IP and DRM issues.

please post other such 'potentially good' representatives in reply.

But really, if you want someone with a suit and a long list of credentials to represent the people in a debate on intellectual property, pick the Professor of Law at Stanford, Lawrence Lessig. That's who I would pick. I like his views and his ideas. I publish some of my work under a creative commons license, and tried to follow the Elred case.

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nukem996 points out "The counter-terrorism unit on TV series '24' went KDE this season, too."

dot.kde.org's news entry claims

"Interestingly they used a 3-year-old KDE 1.x desktop. These older icons are made available under a public domain licence."

There is no such thing as "a public domain license". Putting a copyrighted work in the public domain means forgoing all copyright power for that work. Licenses, by contrast, tell you what you what the terms are for activities regulated by copyright law. Licensed works are still under copyright.

When I read the KDE art site pointed to by dot.kde.org's article, I can't find the phrase "public domain". There is language that suggests the copyright holders tried to do something similar ("The images inside this directory are COMPLETELY FREE for commercial and non-commercial use." emphasis theirs). To be clear, when you mean the work is in the public domain, say the work is in the public domain. The Creative Commons makes doing this easy now (if you're talking about US copyright law).

Yes, due to globalization every time you produce anything you are assisting arms development, but you must admit that there are degrees of assistence. I think it's perfectly reasonable to fork any open source license to include restrictions on use; some examples:

• This software may not be run on hardware platforms that have been designed to cause loss of life or property.
• This software may not be used on military information systems.
• This software may not be used to directly assist in the development of weapons technology.
• This software may not be used by military organizations or companies that are contracted by military organizations.

You'd probably want something modular like the Creative Commons License so every group of developers could decide for themselves just what uses of their software they were acceptable with. Yes, this might not be "free", but I think that for the majority of users such software will be philosophically compatible with free software. Remember: GPL is not the point, freedom is the point.

Bzzzt. No, you're wrong, but thanks for playing. All books do NOT belong to the public once they are published. They still belong to the author, who has licensed limited rights to the publisher in exchange for publishing, distribution, promotion, etc. Copyright laws say that the work will eventually pass into the public domain, but according to, let's say the Berne Convention, that time is author's life plus 50. (Leaving the United States' Incarcerate Mickey Mouse Forever Act out of the discussion for now.)

The author may choose to make his/her works available under certain circumstances earlier. For instance, I am published under copyright by a major publisher, and I self-publish under Creative Commons, which is a GNU GPL-ish flavour of copyright. And I while I would not want to deny people access to my work, I do have the right to maintain control over what people do with my work once they access it. For instance, you do not have the right to take my Creative Commons work and sell it commercially; you may take it, modify it, use it non-commercially, etc. (The CC licenses have a fair amount of flexibility and granularity.)

In the case of Amazon, technically, the Search In a Book could be argued as part of "fair use." The possibility for it to be misused exists, but the permitted uses far exceed the potential for misuse. The argument that says cookbooks and reference books will suffer through this technology may be true, but no truer than today, when someone sits down in a Barnes & Noble, takes a recipe book from the shelf, and copies down a recipe.

Ultimately, however, the choice as to whether to be included or not should be the author's, without coercion from the publisher. Some authors will be sufficiently enlightened to know that they stand a greater chance of being found this way and opt-in; others will choose to opt-out. It can be done with a choice of IN/OUT at the time a book contract is signed.

• Translations and other transformations of public domain works (such transformations get their own copyright, but we're seeing more that comes in with CreativeCommons or similar licenses)
• Copyrighted works submitted by contemporary authors. We have a standard non-exclusive permission procedure for this, see our HOWTO at ibiblio.org/gutenberg
• Works from 1922 through 1964 that were not renewed. While proving non-renewal has historically been very hard, we are working to make this much easier by digitizing renewal records. In the hundreds of years of copyright registration, only about 10% is ever renewed -- that means that literally millions of items that were registered from 1922-1964 are now public domain, but we need proof from the renewal records. More our copyright howto at the site mentioned above.
• 2018 is nearly upon us. If copyright is not extended further, we'll once again start getting a year's work added to the public domain each year. (That was the case, until the Bono act of 1998 halted this growth of the public domain for 20 years)

Also, we continue to work with the EFF and ACLU to challenge copyright extension activities. You can expect a rigorous challenge, if YACTE (Yet Another Copyright Term Extension) is proposed in Congress (there were 14 extensions during the 20th century!).

• Greg (Project Gutenberg's CEO

While the "Public Domain Dedication" at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ seems reasonable, I created my own version which you can see at the bottom of my page http://us.metamath.org/symbols/symbols.html . Although I think it is OK as it is, I welcome comments.

I provide the md5 sum of my public domain file archive. While this may seem nitpicky, it allows the work to be identified unambigously, eliminating the possibility of accidentally using a modified version of that file that someone else has copyrighted. This is one of the dangers of public domain - for example, a photograph of a public-domain painting can be copyrighted, even though it may be visually indistinguishable from another one that has been released to public domain.

Also, I explicitly mention some of the things that can be done with a public domain work to educate the reader. I see many misguided pronouncements making things "public domain" with restrictions attached - for example, "public domain as long as you keep any derivative work public domain", "public domain but you must acknowledge me as the author", or "public domain for educational use". These are really copyright licenses, which is fine if that's what the authors want, but they misunderstand the term "public domain".

What is my personal motivation for making something public domain? For me there is a certain kind of satisfaction I get from old books and images with expired copyright, in that I am completely unencumbered to do whatever I wish with them, without any concern about possible consequences of copying, quoting, sharing, building on, or otherwise using the words, images, and ideas contained therein. I don't have to obsess with keeping track of and chasing down credits and permissions for every little piece of every little image that I might use.

Because I like the feeling of this kind of complete freedom, it is my desire that others experience it with respect to certain work of my own. If by my example some other people are encouraged to do the same, that would benefit me.

Public domain can also make things more practical. Since it can be so time-consuming to track down the copyrights for all the images you want to use on a web page, that often it is more efficient just to reinvent the wheel, taking your own photos of the same thing and redrawing your own versions of the same figures. Royalty-free collections can satisfy the need to a certain extent, but you still have to be careful to understand the licensing terms when using them - for example, do they allow your final work, and therefore any of their images contained in it, to be released to public domain if some day you should decide to do so?

In the end, under public domain I accept that someone may "steal" my work and call it their own. But honorable people give credit where credit makes sense, and for me life is too short to give a hoot about the others. So far it has not been a problem; instead, people have thanked me for making it public domain, and that makes me feel good.

I was going to add that some companies, like O'Reilly Publishing, are following the Founder's Copyright and releasing works into the public domain after 14 (or 28) years at most.

However, in fact, they are not. Instead they are releasing the books with an open license. Thus, while Project Gutenberg could republish these works under the terms of the license, they would remain copyrighted and probably miss the spirit of the project.

Free Media

Both links found at Creative Commons

I hope these will help. They're just collections of photos licensed under creative commons licesnses which will probably allow you to use them freely.

Also check out the wikipedia page on photography

These 2 pages have conflicting information:
http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/ http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=sli deshow&type=figure&sici=journal-pbio-0000009-g 001
Look at "ShareAlike" and Non-commericial. The symbols are wrong.
Also why did they make the "ShareAlike" symbol very similar to CopyLeft? It confused when I first saw it.....

So this license would be acceptable then? But not in its entirity in an exact copy. Hmm. I don't know how you would apply those conditions to ONLY individual works and not the whole collection (as in a DVDrip floating around p2p rather than your mp3s/etc.).

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