I tried to point out last year that you can't really upgrade a Creative Commons license, something a lot of CC licensors claimed to be doing at the time, unless the new license you're after extends the same rights guaranteed in the original license. You can license new work under a new license, but you can't retroactively limit uses of your work for which you've explicitly granted permission.
In the comments of Lawrence Lessig's response to an interesting-for-its-silliness Reuters article on CC, Karl-Friedrich Lenz asks whether it might be a good idea to provide creators with a limited term license, one that takes into account drastic changes in how an author perceives a work (e.g. an author's CC-licensed song is suddenly a hit and he wants his damn commercial rights back!). Lessig responds:
As they're written, Creative Commons licenses run as long as the copyright (which we all know is a "limited term"). So if you've given away commercial rights, anyone who has accepted the license before you revoke the offer continues to have rights.
This is, of course, the point I was trying to make. But a limited term license is an interesting idea.
I don't know why I'm doing this; I really don't. Sigh. Dave Winer says:
[H]ow long has it been since Boing Boing pointed to Scripting News with anything remotely approaching respect? I would absolutely plotz if they ever took a balanced view toward anything here.
Here are the Boing Boing mentions of Dave Winer I could find on Google (not including simple via links), in chronological order. I'll give +1 for items that are overall positive, -1 for those that are overall negative, and +0 for neutral items.
- Wednesday, August 15, 2001 - Cory Doctorow (favorably) mentions Frontier's email-to-blog feature. +1
- Friday, January 4, 2002 - Cory Doctorow calls the lawyers hired by a Vancouver company claiming to have a patent on RSS and RDF "sleazy IP bounty hunters." +1
- Thursday, January 17, 2002 - Cory Doctorow mentions that he found his friend George Scriban's blog via Dave's site. +0
- Monday, March 25, 2002 - Cory Doctorow points to the Long Bets foundation and specifically mentions Dave's wager with Martin Nisenholtz. Cory brands Dave a "nerd squillionaire," but that's the type of insult I could get used to. Oh, well. Neutral. +0
- Thursday, May 16, 2002 - Cory Doctorow calls Dave's talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference "good stuff." +1
- Wednesday, May 22, 2002 - Cory Doctorow links Dave's proposal to add the <ttl> element to RSS. Cory says: "I love the idea of people working hard to augment the noninfringing uses of Gnutella." +1
- Monday, June 17, 2002 - Cory Doctorow: "Get well soon, Dave!" +1
- Wednesday, August 21, 2002 - Cory Doctorow mentions an exchange between Larry Lessig and Winer regarding geeks and politics. Cory says: "Larry's taken time off from working on one of the most important Supreme Court copyright challenges in the history of America to write this very cogent response." I think that sounds sarcastic. I'll give Dave the benefit of the doubt. -1
- Saturday, February 1, 2003 - Cory Doctorow: "Dave Winer has been doing a very good job of linking to noteworthy coverage of the Columbia disaster." +1
- Tuesday, March 4, 2003 - Xeni Jardin points to Dave's notes on getting audblog to work with Userland. Neutral. +0
- Wednesday, June 11, 2003 - Cory Doctorow excerpts Heath Row's coverage of the Weblog Business Strategies conference. Heath says: "I'm Dave Winer without the brains and the money. But it's not the brains or the money that's most important about Dave. Dave is a student of the culture, and he's a relentless listener to democracy." +1
- Tuesday, July 1, 2003 - Xeni Jardin praises the efforts of Dave (et al) in finding a kidney donor for former Wired columnist Dave Jacobs. +1
- Monday, November 17, 2003 - Cory Doctorow: "Dave Winer is calling on leading Democratic hopefuls -- who have, one and all, turned to the Internet as their primary organizing and fundraising tool -- to pledge to keep the Internet free and open..." I'll call this neutral, just to be safe. +0
Conclusion: Google doesn't share Dave's version of history.