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 writtenoffer 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 hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/