[cc-community] CC-BY content usable under GFDL

Chris Watkins chriswaterguy at appropedia.org
Sun May 4 22:16:29 EDT 2008


On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com>
wrote:

> drew Roberts wrote:
> > Copyleft licenses can have this issue. Does BY-SA allow the addition of
> extra
> > terms? Somehow I doub't it. I will have to check again.
>
> It wouldn't be a copyleft if it did.


Is there confusion over CC-BY (the main one at issue in this thread) vs
CC-BY-SA? The no-extra terms requirement is central to the SA term, in my
understanding. And of course the key point about the CC-BY license, in
contrast, is that it doesn't have the Share-Alike term, and so *does* let
you add more terms - e.g. putting it under a GFDL license. I'm glad that
this seems to actually work in practice (I'd thought there would be some
legal technicalities preventing compatibility, as with CC-BY-SA).

So for organizations that produce original content and want it to be freely
used, and don't mix in a lot of other people's content (unlike a wiki), the
CC-BY license seems to work well. One of Appropedia's partner organizations
is AIDG <http://www.aidg.org/>, and now that they've has switched to the
CC-BY license, it opens their excellent content for us to use. I'm going to
recommend the same license for our other partner organizations such as
Engineers
Without Borders Australia <http://www.ewb.org.au/>.



>
> Saying that "CC-By is compatible with GPL" is equivalent to making the
> claim that "the provisions that the GPL makes for attribution are at
> least sufficient to satisfy the terms of CC-By".
>

That's a more accurate way of expressing my concerns. Anyway, it's the
intention of the licensor that matters, if it doesn't contradict the clear
wording of the license. It seems there is no clear wording to stop us using
CC-BY content in our GFDL content, so I'm confident to start using it.
Woo-hoo!

Chris


> Unfortunately, both licenses leave sufficient room for interpretation
> that there exist interpretations which are incompatible. However, IMHO,
> those are fringe interpretations and the statement is true for the most
> likely interpretations of both licenses, so the odds of someone
> successfully claiming that CC-By has been violated by GPL conversion are
>  extremely slim.
>
> Or so it seems to me.
>
> Cheers,
> Terry
>
> (Who is not a lawyer, etc).
>
> --
> Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
> Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
>
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-- 
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