A brief explaination of Creative Commons licenses.

Creative Commons licensing primarily is a choice of freedoms and conditions. There are also a few additional licenses.

The freedoms are share and remix. Share (by) allows people to copy your work with no modifications. Remix allows people to distribute modifed copies of your work. Remix must be specifically denied (nd).

The conditions are Non-commericial (nc) and Share-alike (sa). Non-commercial prevents people from selling your work. Share-alike is only available when remixing is allowed. It requires people who change your work to distribute their new work with the same license you used.

The possible main licenses are:
by
by nc
by nc sa
by nc nd
by nd
by sa

There are also special licenses. The"sampling" license, which only allows derivitive works to be reproduced, not the original. The "public domain dedication" license, which places the work in to public domain. The "developing nations" license, which is essentialy a "by" license, but with only give these freedoms to those residing in nations not defined as "high income" by the world bank. The "founder's copyright" license, which shortens the copyright (with all rights reserved, as normal) to 14 years, with the option of a 14 year extension (totaling 28 years). Creative Commons also offers "commons deeds", the simplified form of licenses, for the GNU GPL/LGPL.

The Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive. The author retains all rights to license work under other licenses. The rights given cannot be revoked. It is permissible to remove the license, but those already using the work keep all rights given by the license until they violate it. The licenses do not infringe on fair use and other rights.

Why must the world have so many idiots?

Apple has settled with Creative for $100 million dollars over the hirarchcal menu interface (Genre -> Artist -> Album -> Song). This came after Creative claimed a patent (issued to them in 2001) was violated by Apple. There are two problems with this decision.

1. iPods have been around for awhile. Creative has had plenty of time to file for this, but just filed this year.
2. The patent is obvious. It's a system that's been in use for a long time, just applied to a portable digital music player. The fact it is "intuitive" (probably a word used in the patent) means it is OBVIOUS.

Also, the settlement my lower if Creative secures licensing deals with other DMP manufacturers.

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Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I think he's with the CIA

That long?

On slashdot (see links) there is an article saying that under a new National Highway Traffic Safety Asministration resolution, car manufactuers will have to tell people that the car they are buying has a black box (which in this case records data related to how the person drives, such as speed). It also limits what black boxes can record. This sounds good, and is, but dows not have to be complied with until model year 2011. This is is really much too long. After all, how long does it really take for car dealershipws to start telling people which cars have black boxes? Probably a few months, maybe six months, at most a year (it would seem, but I can't know for a fact, so anyone in the industry tell me IN A COMMENT). Changing the programming in black boxes shouldn't take too long either (for the manufacturer), especially as it is almost entirely removing code and changing/adding a few lines of code. So the deadline for compliance could be model year 2007-2009 (somewhere in there)

Also, something interesting said was

while totally irrelevant, it lead to an interesting thought... the data in the recorder is a unique pattern generated by the drivers purposeful actions- eg the data was explicitly designed by the driver and therefore is automatically copyrighted on their behalf..

Someone else said in reply

i don't think that argument would fly, but if it's a unique expression of the owner would it not also be self-incrimination?

(Damn, blockquotes are a pain in the @$$)

This could be helpful, but the cops can get away with most anything, so it doesn't matter.