[cc-community] Backwards compatibility

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Thu Oct 28 11:58:38 EDT 2010


On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 5:55 AM, Mike Dupont <jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com
> wrote:

> I am hosting some data on archive.org under cc by sa 3.0,
> it is supposed to be for osm, and that is under cc by sa 2.0,
> Is there any problem with that? what about backwards compatibility?
>

You can distribute a licensed work under its original license (ie BY-SA
2.0). You can offer an adaptation under the original license or a compatible
one (including later versions, ie BY-SA 3.0). See 4(a) and 4(b) of
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode

Whether you've created an adaptation or not, I suppose depends.

Many services support only one version of a license (eg Flickr 2.0,
Archive.org whatever is current, ie 3.0) and sometimes one wants to upload
someone else's licensed work to one of these services. In a few cases where
I've wanted to do this I've selected whatever version of the license is
available on the service so that one looking for works under that kind of
license could find the work and linked to the exact version of the license
used in the item description, eg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlinksva/3998492960/ ... admittedly this is a
pain, confusing, and probably not generally recommendable.

You might be talking about the reverse situation -- you want to publish some
work under BY-SA 3.0 and you want it to be used by a project under BY-SA
2.0. That's easier (but still not super intuitive) -- you can offer multiple
licenses, so just say in the item description you're also offering under
BY-SA 2.0.

All of which is to say a) IANAL b) this is not legal advice c) this is
probably misguided d) creating new versions of licenses should only be done
when really necessary, as it creates all kinds of small problems.

Mike


-- 
https://creativecommons.net/ml
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