The question of whether or not the Terra Nova blog should be licensed under the Creative Commons has been raised. While some have worried that this might appear to be pimping for Professor Lessig, it is certainly an intriguing idea.
I was elected to post because Second Life will soon be working with the helpful people at CC.org to figure out how to best apply the various CC licenses within a virtual space. Many of the CC licenses directly map onto existing SL permissions, but some permissions don't have CC analogs. For example, there is no real world CC license for the Second Life permission "Buyer may copy, but not transfer, this texture" which is used to protect the seller of repeating textures, like bricks, without forcing the customer to buy one copy of the texture for each geometric object she wants to texture. Julian and Lawrence have also proposed the very interesting idea of allowing SL users to search and view the world based on whether the objects allow copying/reuse.
So far, the following licenses have been proposed:
The Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License, which means that any use of TN postings must be attributed, may not be used commercially, and may not be used for derived works.
The Attribution-NoDerivs License, which is the is the same but allows commerial use if attributed.
Attribution-ShareAlike License, which allows commercial work and derived works, but any derived works need to be shared with the same license.
For an example of this at work, you can check out Julian's website, which is now licensed under CC.
So what do you think?
