Jason Scott wrote an astute post about the pros and cons of a creative commons liscense for people to consider.

Check it out.

One case that sticks out in my mind was this guy who had his stuff up on Opsound, totally claiming the license of CC-BY-SA, but also including “you may not make any changes to the work” in the description of his band. His music was pretty good, and I was considering using it, but that dissonant line got my attention. So I wrote him, and said “So are you licensing it Creative Commons, or is it copyrighted? Because you can’t have both those lines in there.” His response, somewhat crankily, was “No, it’s definitely CC licensed, but you can’t change it.” My ill-advised response was “Well, yes, yes I absolutely can.” Things went downhill from there.

It basically boils down to the importance of, not only reading but understanding, the small print.

The fact that I love this sort of stuff so much makes me wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off becoming an intellectual property lawyer.