Nice piece of thinking. Creative Commons are developing an extraordinarily important legal mindset – a sort of “law for the masses”.
I rather approve of an approach that says “these are the laws we want, so – hey – we’ll hire some lawyers and push through the facilities accordingly.”
Of course, Big Business has been doing that for years…
Today the Creative Commons launched a new standalone license, dubbed Developing Nations. The deed lays it out simply: it’s an attribution-only license that applies within developing nations. The legal code defines developing nations as “any nation that is not classified as a ‘high-income economy’ by the World Bank.” which according to the World Bank’s site means it does not apply in these countries.
This license can be used in a few ways. It can be combined with something currently licensed under a more restrictive license, so that your photographs could be protected from commercial use in the United States, but if it also carried a Developing Nations license, those same photos could be used commerically in say, Brazil. You might also be a musician or photographer that wants to maintain full copyright in North America and Western Europe, but welcome use by others in the countries of Southeast Asia.