Moonbase

Ted’s floated the idea of enforcing CC license provisions programmatically in Inkscape. Mild DRM, essentially. It’s a bad idea, and very contrary to the spirit of Creative Commons.

Lawrence Lessig put it like this:

But why not add DRM to the rights expressed through Creative Commons DRE? What’s wrong with a cheap system to enforce the rights still reserved?

There are two problems at least. We can see the first by returning to the picture of what made this network amazing—interoperability. Widespread DRM would disable that interoperability. Or at least, it would disable interoperability without permission first. We could remix, or add, or criticize, using digital content, only with the permission of the content controller. And that requirement of permission first would certainly disable a large part of the potential that the Internet could realize.

The second problem relates to “fair use.” The law of copyright has never given copyright owners the right to perfect control over their copyrighted work. Fair use is a codified exception to that control. As we see them today, DRM technologies cannot respect “fair use.”

I’d like to add that such a system also can’t easily accomodate important things like copyright expiration, changes in copyright law, and explicit grants of special permission.

I don’t forsee Inkcape switching to the GPL v3 simply because there are too many extant copyright holders, not all of whom are either available or cooperative. Like Ted, I’m also not keen on the snarky rebranding of DRM as “Digital Restrictions Management”.

However, the fact that even sharp folks like him find these sorts of controls appealing (only for “good”, of course) is a strong argument in favor of the v3 anti-DRM provisions. As a social contract for programmers, the GPL needs to address this contemporary temptation.

Update: Bryce points out that since the Inkscape license statements doesn’t generally specify a version of the GPL, GPL section 9 means that the terms any version, GPL v3 included, may be applied at the recipient’s choosing.

I wonder how that works if you do something (e.g. DRM) that was okay under the GPL <= v2, but not v3. I’d assume that the GPL v3 simply couldn’t be applied in that case.