Warranty in next version of CC licenses

Evan Prodromou evan at wikitravel.org
Mon Jan 26 18:22:19 EST 2004


As the publisher of a wiki that uses the by-sa license, I'm very
concerned about the removal of the warranties from the licenses. Our
wiki depends on those warranties to ensure that our project, its
contributors, and downstream publishers aren't responsible for the
misdeeds or ignorance of one misguided contributor.

If you don't have rights to your content, you have no business
claiming that it's available under an open content license. If you
abuse copyright, trademark, privacy or publicity rights, you should
take responsibility for your actions. If you don't want to be
responsible, don't publish your work, and don't encourage others to
republish it with a CC license.

I read Dan Bricklin's notes on warranty for bloggers
(http://www.satn.org/archive/2003_04_27_archive.html#200212947), and I
can see that for bloggers who write posts like "I saw this on the NY
Times today: [10 paragraphs of copied text]. Pretty neat, huh?",
warranties are bad things. But I think tailoring the CC licenses to
the needs of bloggers who are ignorant and sloppy about copyright is
probably not the best direction to go.

Bottom line: as a publisher of free content contributed by hundreds of
individuals, I depend on the warranties in the CC licenses. I'm going
to have to think very hard about following the next version of the
licenses unless some kind of warranties are in place.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide



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