Hex wrote:That's entirely the creator's fault. Allowing someone to screw up and cause a mangled legal ambiguity is not "respect". It's also massive disrespect for content reusers, who are first-class individuals in the CC scheme, to create a system that leaves them wondering if the person that created these works is going to "change" their license and start a fight with them. The CC system was not designed for content reusers to have to have a library of look-I-can-prove-it documents just in case someone chooses their mind.
When I see the words "entirely the creator's fault" used in the context of a mistake (or as I would contend, an inability to grasp the far reaching consequences of the licence), where you put the rights of the re-user above the rights of the creator, then I know that there is something pretty fucked up about the argument.
As I often mention, because people outside Europe don't seem to grasp how things work, there is a lot of law in the UK that works on the premise that contracts are more complicated than the average person can cope with, so if they are not crystal clear, or have hidden implications, the courts can strike them out as unreasonable contracts. Add that together with the consumer protection laws where basically we can return a product on the flimsiest of pretexts, nominally "unsatisfactory" defined in the widest sense, and you have a culture where the onus is on everyone to ensure arrangements are clear and fair.
At its heart, there is a fraud in the free licensing, and that fraud is that there is no harm, only benefit. This is then compounded by arguments based on the principle that because things can be copied freely, things other than physical objects have no real value, and it is unreasonable for someone who might have spent millions on some electronic creation to retain rights to something that can so readily be replicated.
Is it right that the iPod has (only) made Apple so much money when it is useless without the content, the vast majority of which generated no money for the content creators? If every user paid 1 cent to the artist for the right to listen to a track to the iPod in perpetuity (that would cost me about $150 for my entire collection) would that be unreasonable?