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

drew Roberts zotz at 100jamz.com
Mon Dec 10 10:37:16 EST 2007


On Monday 10 December 2007 10:33, Terry Hancock wrote:
> 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).

Right, statements can grant multiple licenses, they can't modify the internals 
of a license. Is that correct?
>
> 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).

Right, and I would like to take this opportunity to ask that "hosters" take 
this time option into account, and that business "hosters" (eg. lulu, 
cafepress, etc.) also take a sales goal (or some other suitable money / 
income) related limit into account as well.
>
> 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.
> ;-)

It might be interesting to build it in for the payment of a pre-specified fee. 
Not a discussion for now though I would think.
>
> Cheers,
> Terry

all the best,

drew


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