additional terms to by-nc-sa
Mike Linksvayer
ml at creativecommons.org
Mon Jul 5 22:34:17 EDT 2004
Alvin Oga wrote:
> i've been looking over the by-nc-sa license
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0
>
> i was wondering ... how does one add additional terms
> and conditions to the license ?
Evan's reply
<http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2004-June/000956.html>
is correct -- you can add whatever terms you want, you just can't call
the result a Creative Commons license.
I understand that lots of people would like to tweak the licenses in one
way or another that we can't accomodate. AFAIK most end up using a
standard CC license after considering the matter. If tweak a license,
you lose at least three major benefits you get from using a standard CC
license:
- Your new license isn't widely understood or trusted. People have to
actually read it to be comfortable with it. That imposes a very high
cost on licensors.
- Your license may not be legally solid. The existing CC licenses have
been written by top law firms. (Aside: Someone once observed that if CC
counted value in a manner similar to the RIAA, we'd have created many
billions of dollars of value -- multiply the market rate of the time
donated by very expensive lawyers working pro bono on the licenses by
the total number of people using CC licenses...)
- Whatever works are licensed using your new license aren't likely to be
cataloged, searched, or otherwise exposed by software that looks for CC
licenses.
> specifically, i'd like to specificy things like:
>
> venue ... that all legal disputes will be according to the
> state of california, santa clara county
>
> address ... all correspondences comes into our offices
> or legal service agents for legal issues
>
> attorney ... should also be included so that those that do
> might otherwise want to get involved wont be scared away
> because there's no attorney's fees clauses in it
To my understanding you'd have to modify the license to include these
things. But as above, you might want to think hard about whether you
really need them. Regarding venue and address, I'd think they wouldn't
be hugely important as you're the licensor, and you'd be the one sending
legal notices to others, not vice versa.
Note of course that I'm not a lawyer, I don't give legal advice, etc.
> non-commercial ... that could mean different things to different
> folks so i'd like to more explicitly define it
If you want to grant rights for limited commercial use, e.g., you can
sell 10 copies, but not more, you could grant such rights completely
separate from the license.
Also, FWIW, I understand that James Grimmelmann is working on better
explanations of what non-commercial actually means. You can see some
posts from him on this list and cc-community, e.g.,
<http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2004-June/000968.html>.
If you have specific questions about non-commercial you might ask them
here.
--
Mike Linksvayer
http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21
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