thinking about copyright
from reading creative commons docs ("Things to think about before you apply a Creative Commons license"), I'm getting the impression that conceptually, copyright is the right to apply a license to your work. when work has a creative commons license, the creator still retains copyright. cc licenses seem to codify the mechanisms of cultural transfer.
from the US Copyright website (Copyright Office Basics - What is copyright?), I get that copyright means that the owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to reproduce the work, make derivative works, distribute (including sale of) the work, and to perform, display, or play a recording of the work. copyright applies to "original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression," where "tangible medium of expression" (gov faq) is something you can see/hear/touch; I guess this would include web pages, and sheet or recorded music but presumably not unrecorded music, thoughts, speeches, conversations, jokes, and dances/movements.
so yeah: copyright is the right to determine how your work is used, which is done by attatching a license to the work. while the general idea of copyright is an "all rights reserved" license, that's not what copyright itself means. if copyright were a limited-time right (as it should be...), then any license a copyright owner applied to their work—creative commons, all rights reserved, whatever—would end when the term of copyright ended.
question: where do licenses like the GPL fall in terms of copyright? on the cc site something was mentioned about cc licenses not being the best option for software... what is a better option? why? as far as "tangible mediums" go, what about smell and taste, if you can fix it... ie, scratch and sniff stickers, dish soap smells? what about works in temporary mediums, like visual art made in sand? If it were recorded, then copyright would apply, but if the only recording of it was peoples' memories? (guess I have some more reading to do)
also, notes about cc licensing specifically: it's irrevocable, non-exclusive (can license the same work to generally under one license and to specific people under different licenses), you should be specific about what is cc licensed (ie, music but not album art, text but not design, everything everything). and some notes from thinking about licensing: you can write your own license. cc is just an established set of licenses. rolling your own license is like rolling your own software; sometimes it makes something that fits just right, and sometimes you write in big ugly holes.
