On Tue, 27 Dec 2005, Scott Lawton wrote:
Are there any opinions about the suitability of creative commons copyright vs regular copyright when the intent is to allow unlimited personal and non-profit non-commercial use of the works.
IANAL and may be completely wrong, but I think the two are somewhat different. You can retain full *ownership* of the copyright and choose to make works available under a CC *license*.
Same with the PG license.
That is one of the cc options, but I have read that the use of a cc copyright might bring an unwanted third party into any copyright disputes, and might further limit the author's rights.
I don't know whether a CC license is considered "revokable" -- so that's one thing you might give up vs. just granting a license on a case-by-case basis.
The PG license specifially states "irrevocable"
AND I haven't read (or looked for) any of the critiques of CC that you cite. I think the advantage of CC is that it's simple and well-defined; that's hard to beat with a hand-crafted license. There is legal muscle behind CC, and I personally would recommend it. They clearly learned from the various "open source" software licenses and encapsulated the options without getting dragged into the fight between the various factions. --
The PG license is speficially tailored to eBooks, and has many more years of history behind it. . .precedent counts a lot in our laws. mh