[cc-community] License grant statements, was Re: An easy way to notify licensors about new license versions

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Dec 10 10:33:49 EST 2007


drew Roberts wrote:
> Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Monday 10 December 2007 09:26:23 Terry Hancock wrote:
>>>GPL(2+) w/statement   YES                       YES

>>CC-By-SA w/statement    YES                       YES

> That is what I am on about.
> 
> CC BY-SA w/statement.

> Perhaps any modifying type statements would not work, but one which simply 
> allows for the use of any later version is not like that. It really is just 
> multiple licensing. How could I be so dense on that one for so long? That is 
> a bit scary. Sorry for putting you all through that, but thank you for your 
> patience and explanations.

Sorry, that was probably confusing because of the way I abbreviated the
info in the table. By "w/statement" I meant "with a license grant that
uses the 'or any later version' statement". I didn't mean any freeform
statement.

Note however that it is NOT strictly limited to "later version" clauses,
because any additional permission which grants uses outside of the
license can be viewed as a separate license (just a very short one).

There are plenty of interesting ways this could be used. My "sunset-NC"
license idea can be done this way, for example:

"""
You may use this work under the terms of the CC-By-NC-SA 3.0, effective
immediately. Effective Dec 10, 2009, you may choose to use the work
under the terms of the CC-By-SA, either version 3.0 or any later version.
"""

(Might need to have some details refined).

This grants two licenses:
1) CC-By-NC-SA 3.0, effective now
2) CC-By-SA 3.0+, effective 2009-12/10

Of course, the NC license doesn't go away -- it's still there even after
the effective date, because it can't be revoked.

(As far as I know, there is nothing preventing a license grant from
setting an effective date for a license to be applied. This is nice from
my perspective, because the grant statement makes a clear legally
binding promise to release the work on a certain date, thus avoiding the
ambiguity of vague advertising promises that you will release something
under a free license at some time in the future -- it's a
legally-binding 'future-proofing' statement which is a value to the user).

Of course, AFAIK, you can't make that kind of promise "sharealike" --
once the work goes into the free domain, you don't allow a similar
proprietary period for others -- you'd need to write a new license for that.

Whether that's a bug or a feature I leave as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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