[Opensim-dev] Legal Issues was RFC Profiles

[Michael Cortez]

 >> I'm not sure I would support having Creative Commons be the default 
though...
 >> while it is an excellent option for some work and I have used it for 
some content
 >> I have developed, it does reduce the creator's rights that are 
normally assumed
 >> by the Berne convention or US copyright laws.

This is true.

With the four component options available for CC, many scenarios are 
covered:

http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

But not all.

All of the CC options assume you allow redistribution, but aside from 
that in most cases "Copy-No Mod" would be equivalent to something like 
"Attribution No Derivatives" and "Copy-Mod" would essentially be 
"Attribution Share-Alike" or "Attribution Non-Commercial."

What's missing is a "No Distribution" clause.  If the organizers had the 
foresight to be complete, rather then altruistic, the addition of a 
non-redistribution clause IMHO would have made for the ultimate 
mix/match license.

An "All rights reserved, you are licensed to use this for personal use" 
type clause for "No Perms" would be good.

Lots of ideas, and there will be lots of complexity -- and of course we 
don't want to start handing out legal advice -- but as others have 
mentioned, if we start with some way of adding asset meta data -- we can 
then grow from there.

Now of course, for specific grids like say <cough>OSGrid</cough> -- 
where I suspect the admin's aren't really in this to be  IP rights 
cops,  and probably don't want people coming after them with  lawyers 
because some bug  exposed  an exploitable asset copy mechanism, or 
because someone connected a hacked region to the grid to suck assets out 
-- perhaps having the default licensing be something like CC -- which 
always guarantees redistribution isn't such a bad thing?

--
Michael Cortez