[cc-community] License Deed Icons

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Tue Mar 11 20:22:44 EDT 2008


On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Terry Hancock
<hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
>  Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
>  > <quote who="Terry Hancock" date="Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 10:20:39PM -0600">
>  >> Presumeably, the sponsoring organizations for those licenses could
>  >> provide a similar "deed" if they wanted to. Alternatively, a neutral
>  >> organization like http://freedomdefined.org might decide to take it on.
>  >
>  > That's a great suggestion. I think we should!
>
>  With that kind of enthusiasm, I can see this happening. It's not that
>  hard, after all.
>
>  What would be the trademark situation w.r.t. using the CC's by-now-very-
>  familiar license/deed identification symbols -- the circles with icons
>  to represent "By", "SA", "NC", "ND", as well as the additional ones for
>  the source code requirement (used in CC's GPL deed) and the "right to
>  copy", "right to modify" buttons?
>
>  It seems to me that if there were to be a community of "deeds" published
>  by various organizations, it would be highly desirable for the community
>  if a common graphical language were used in doing so.
>
>  I think CC asserts trademark rights in these symbols, however.

Some of them anyway.

I strongly suspect we'd agree to allow someone like FD.o (but not joe
random) to use the tm. Actually there's long been at least the idea
that organizations publishing similar licenses would use the same
human/machine/lawyer-readable architecture as CC, and presumably to
make maximum use of the human portion of that, such should use the
existing icons.  See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5709 for
one sketch of that idea (of course the FDL would be somewhat
different, so don't try to apply the sketch literally).

Another option would be for CC to host a deed and metadata for the FDL
a la http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/ -- I personally
would not mind doing that.

Yes, we should be providing the same for the *GPLv3.  For that (and
even moreso, the FDL), the hard part is really figuring out how to
summarize the license in a concise "CC deed" like format and what
ought to be represented in metadata, and that would be the case
wherever these would be hosted.

I'd be happy to give (non-lawyer) feedback on such deed language and
metadata regardless of hosting, but don't have the bandwidth to lead
it right now.

Mike


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