Creative Commons is meant to increase creator rights, not decrease them

As creators, we all have intellectual property that would not hurt us but could help the community at large if we share with them. It could even possibly improve our reputation and bring us more business.

Unfortunately, in the past, this intellectual property did not have clear licenses that could help benefit us all and could even harm the contributor.

BSD, GPL and CC are attempts at providing solutions to these intellectual property problems and rightly so.

Not only can I now benefit the community at large, I can do so in a way that ensures I will not be abused and my competitors will not be able profit overly from my contribution.

However, these licenses were not meant to replace / degrade / decrease the rights of the creator. Rather, they were meant to give her more power and flexibility.

One of the great beauties of SecondLife is the belief in the creator. Degrading any of their rights, even for technically arguable minor points, is a dangerous drifting away from the philosophies of rational self interest that will make SL successful.

There may be problems with innovation or production in SL right now, but to believe that removing rights from the creators is a solution is to be looking in completely the wrong direction.

I wish someone at LL would realise that "fair use" isn't a god given right of anyone, but more like a set of special conditions that you can use in your defense if you are found in violation of someone's copyrights.
There is no law that states that "fair use" of a given medium should be mandatory, facilitated or even possible at all. There is no law penalizing those who make it impossible through copy prevention devices or techniques.
If LL really wants this to "take over the world" it needs to start acting more like a real business and cater to the mainstream thought currents instead of some fringe anti-copyright movement.
The average user never heard of Eldred v. Ashcroft or Lawrence Lessig or even Open Source Software and the GPL. Neither do they care.
The average man on the street does not care about tinkering. He consumes the crap Big Business throws at him with gleeful abandon and actively discriminates against those of us who do not partake in such passive consumerist lifestyles.
SL needs to be cater to mainstream people in order to succeed. We are still an order of magnitude smaller than... just about any mainstream MMOG

Not so. Copyright does not guarantee absolute control over how others use your work. Fair use ensures that a book review can quote the book being reviewed, and that academic works can do likewise. Fair use allows you to write a favorite line of poetry onto a piece of paper and stick it to your refrigerator.

Jake, it sounds like you and Eggy are saying similar things, just different ways. . . not sure.

I think more of what Eggy is saying is that Fair Use isn't forced on the creators.

Fair Use would say that I should be able to quote a block of code from a program that I bought in an instructive type book about coding. . .

However, this doesn't force a software company to make their code accessible to be viewed.

If somehow, a book could psychically know that you were copying a line of poetry out of it, it wouldn't be against the law for the manufacturer's of that magic book to make the book go blank as soon as you started.

It doesn't guarantee that you get Fair Use, it just allows for it if the creator allows for it.

Otherwise, we'd have no copy protection.

If somehow a creator can find a way to circumvent a purchaser's Fair Use, then more power to them. . .someone doesn't have to purchase something that has these measures in place.

Well, you are guaranteed fair use insofar as the author has no grounds on which to sue you for copyright infringement if you have quoted from the book in a review, or put a quote on your refrigerator. Also, the author cannot say "I revoke fair use" beforehand.

If you quote from someone's book in your own book, and it's not an academic/scholarly book, then the author might be able to argue that your quotation was not fair use, and it'll be up to the legal system to decide. But even if a given use is ultimately ruled not be fair use, that doesn't mean that fair use exists only at the creator's discretion.