RE: Creative Commons: for authors who want to share

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

You need to read my other post where I explain that accompanying 
the distribution of a work with a waiver of copyright 
accomplishes the same purpose as the CC license. But I take the 
point that others have made that, in the U.S. at least, the CC 
license does accomplish the goal of requiring attribution, which 
U.S. copyright law itself does not.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>The absence of a license would not allow users to "do anything 
>with the content except reproduce it without attribution to the 
>original author" -- at least, not automatically.  In absence of 
>a license, the user must still seek permission from the author 
>for any use of the material (other than "fair use").
>
>The actual goal of Creative Commons is not just to allow 
>end-users to make certain uses of copyrighted material -- it is 
>to go one step further and explicitly grant rights for those 
>uses **in advance**, instead of requiring those who wish to use 
>them to seek the author's permission later.
>
>This advance clarification of the legal status of the material 
>is intended to facilitate sharing and the creative process, by 
>cutting out the obstacle of permissions-gathering when the 
>author considers it unnecessary.
>
>Luke Rosenberger * Director *
>Library Technology & Historical Collections *
>UT Health Science Center San Antonio *
>MSC 7940, 7703 Floyd Curl Dr * San Antonio TX 78229-3900 *
>+1 210.567.2486 * rosenberger@uthscsa.edu *
>http://www.library.uthscsa.edu
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
>Sent: Thursday, 28 August, 2008 21:14
>To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>Subject: Re: Creative Commons: for authors who want to share
>
>I wasn't talking about the other CC licenses, Heather, only the
>one that allows users to do anything with the content except
>reproduce it without attribution to the original author. My point
>was that one can accomplish that goal without using any license
>at all. The CC license that refers to "everything but commercial
>use" has its own problems, however, because the definition of
>"commercial" is so nebulous.
>
>Sandy Thatcher
>Penn State University Press