IANAL either. Sorry if that was off-putting. It was intended to be more self-deprecating as I was kind of embarrassed to be posting so many comments on this story when I'm a very occasional commenter on slashdot ... haven't earned the right or something.

There's no need to create new licenses to have CC-like easy-to-understand software licenses. CC has experimented with "human readable" deeds for a few software licenses and could work more with groups like FSF and OSI to do more and improve on those.

Noncommercial public licensing failed in software for good reasons, and it would be really dumb to introduce it at this point. Many people complain about NC culture licenses, but for software, they are much worse for a variety of reasons that I'll write about eventually, but see some of the bullets at http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/how-far-behind-free-software-is-free-culture-presentation

There are lots of poor software licenses out there, but the current generation of ones that are widely used and had a ton of attention during drafting are excellent, ie Apache2 and A/L/GPL3. To the extent they are long it is because they need to be (excepting preambles perhaps). CC licenses are also pretty long.

And I didn't mean to imply it is either/or, either. :-)

I suspect that building voluntary commons (in software and culture) is probably the most effective means of advancing long term reform -- they demonstrate that restrictive copyright is not necessary for innovation, creativity, etc.

Uh, see *if you want a permissive license*.

A license creator/steward has to think about the common good, or you end up with a mess of incompatible licenses and other forms of failed sharing.

Brad Kuhn of SFLC (formerly of FSF) put it very well:

We in the non-profit licensing sector of the FLOSS world have a duty to the community of FLOSS users and programmers to defend their software freedom. I try to make every decision, on licensing policy (or, indeed, any issue) with that goal in mind.

Of course CC doesn't do software licenses and some of its licenses are only semi-free by the standards of free as in (software) freedom as applied to culture, but the overall lesson of the responsibility of license stewards applies.

CC0 is not intended for software. If you want copyleft for non-software, CC BY-SA is probably what you want. If you're against copyright there's something to be said for actually renouncing your own (which CC0 tries to do to the maximum extent possible), but I understand the appeal of using copyright against itself, and copyleft certainly has a big role to play.

Yes, it will be translated linguistically (as opposed to "legal porting" done with the main six CC licenses).

No. At least not one used significantly. Around 2000 there were many public content licenses created, including the Design Science License, Ethymonics Free Music Public License, Open Music Green/Yellow/Red/Rainbow Licenses, Open Source Music License, No Type License, Public Library of Science Open Access License, and Electrohippie Collective's Ethical Open Documentation License. Maybe one of those or one even less known happens to be a waive everything only for noncommercial use license. (I didn't mention the ones that were more significant, none of which are what you want.)

Why do you think I make that assertion? I do not. I agree with your assertion. There is always a latent desire to be free of a bad, whether the bad exists or not. I desire to be free of zombie attacks, right now, regardless of the existence of zombie attacks.

Let's go back a bit. I suspect where we might disagree is how one effectively rejects the strict regimen. I say the most effective way to do so is to unambiguously free your creative output, such that even one who does not reject the regimen understands that they are free to to use your creativity. Do you disagree with this? If so, what do you think the most effective way to reject the regimen is?

I have no beef with teachers and learners who do what they have to do.

Anyone who can be meta enough to post on slashdot, I submit, should be thinking further ahead -- ensuring that in a decade there are enough OER that anyone in the world has freedom, regardless of what the copyright regime is (or is not). You and others at WikiEducator and similar sites are doing just that, so many cheers for your activity!

Fighting for fair use and other exceptions is absolutely part of a long term strategy. Critically important to the long term success of free content, analogous to the fight against software patents is critical to the long term success of free software. I can expand that argument if anyone wants to argue. :-)

I can probably agree that most software has a higher discount rate than most non-software, but that changes the optimal length of time until release, not whether to use timed release or not. Ghostscript GPL versions were in fact released after what for culture would be considered a very brief window -- about a year. I couldn't find a timeline of Id releases, but considering the company started in the early 90s and IIRC GPL'd some stuff (I'm no gamer -- Doom?) in the late 90s, probably no more than 5 years.

I find it highly likely the easy availability of timed release would cause some authors who would have released immediately under a public license or into the public domain to use the timed release instead. Consider the simplest case, where one could choose a time delay from the CC license chooser. I bet many people would select it just because they could, just as well over half of people select the NonCommercial option, even though in many cases doing so is counter to what one would hope sharing to accomplish. One could attempt to segregate people one suspects would only free their works if they could do so in a time-delayed manner, but I don't know how one would do that well. Seems like something that should be studied in an experimental econ lab.

Maybe technically the way to do this is through a portal, a CC site or a search engine which only returns free-for-all content. But the non-free content needs to be kept out of the results so it doesn't get in the way.

This is precisely why CC has put such effort into making licenses and licensed works machine readable, ie, with metadata that enables such search that only gives you results with the freedoms you request.

Implementations are far from perfect, but you can go to the advanced search pages at Google, Yahoo, Flickr, and elsewhere -- some available via http://search.creativecommons.org/ -- and say that you want results that can be used commercially and for derivatives. That's a start toward what you want, and one has to start somewhere.

I agree with everything you say above. But you miss my point. Ignoring copyright is not going to lead to no patents, the absence of copyright, or a generally looser intellectual protectionism regime. The idea that ignoring copyright will lead to positive reform or revolution is the dangerous daydream.