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Creative Commons: A safe house for intellectual property

Creative Commons: A safe house for intellectual property


Interesting chat on the #cc channel on freenode - some guy who wouldn't disclose the type of software he was making, but looking for a CC rather than GPL/BSD license for it - specifically so it was non-commercial. A bit of a lost cause really because if you don't understand the mentality of openness and are trying to stop other people making money from your ideas then maybe you shouldn't be looking for these licenses. Or maybe you should and there should just be more levels to let everyone release as much as they want of things...


This guy kept repeating that he wants to make a living from writing code. Same with me with music/art using the creative commons idea - but with me I don't care if from today to tomorrow I make money from a song, so I'm just glad if someone wants to sample or reuse something. It's the skill argument - paid for what you do not what you've done.


Will cc licensed creative material some day reach some kind of critical mass like open source has done - where it's a big and life changing competitor to once towering businesses like microsoft? And then how will we make money from creative activities? Maybe it will be in line with the ecological point of view - maybe society should be very different - and along with changes in software development to follow more distributed, classical anarchic organisation - so will all kinds of things, and we won't make money from anything the way it has been before...

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