Screencasts & Creative Commons

[Matthew Flaschen]

Daniel Goldsmith wrote:
> Sorry to come lately to this issue, but:
> 
> Why are the screencasts being licenced Creative Commons BY-SA? The
> Creative Commons licence includes many restrictive features, such as
> the ones against DRM, which would make it unpalatable to both sides in
> the free-as-in-speech argument.

The DRM provision just says you can't have "technological measures that
control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the
terms of this License Agreement."  I.E. you can't use DRM to effectively
violate the terms of the license.  You can still use it for other purposes.

As for being unpalatable, the FSF specifically says
(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OtherLicenses) Creative
Commons BY-SA-2.0 is Free, though they don't recommend it.  The DRM
provision is basically the same in the 2.0 version.  Moreover, GPLv3
will probably include a similar DRM provision; GPLv3 software can not be
an "effective form of copyright protection" (legal term), all keys used
to sign GPL executables must be distributed with the source, and you
can't stop people from freely using and modifying GPLv3 software in
order to protect content providers.

As for OSI, they haven't approved any CC licenses because they haven't
been submitted, and are outside their scope.

> I guess I'm just curious as to why this path was chosen rather than,
> say, GPL or some other OSI approved licence. What specific benefits
> are there to using this over the alternatives?

These are software licenses, and thus not ideal.  You have to determine
what the source code is, for instance, which is confusing and awkward.

> CC isn't 'Free' in the FSF-Free/Libre Sense, and it isn't Open in the
> OSI/OpenSource sense. This places it outside the Ubuntu Philosophy[1],
> unless I've missed something entirely. Note that I don't want to spark
> a debian-legal type mess, I'm just curious.

Again, that applies to software in the distribution, not creative
content distributed separately.

Matthew Flaschen

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