DFSG (was Re: The Beeb and CC)

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Tue Jun 8 15:53:49 EDT 2004


Ben Francis wrote:
> Evan Prodromou wrote
>> I'll jump in on the
>> Debian side and try to get this straight, though.
> 
> That would be great! I would be very interested what the official 
> position is. 

Thanks to Evan for following up on debian-legal, though the responses 
don't shed much light.  Same for his post and followups on OSI's 
licenses-discuss.

> If CC are making a concious decision NOT to make the licenses DFSG-free 
> and have a good reason for doing so, I'd like to hear their reason and 
> would respect their decision. But if there's no good reason why they 
> couldn't be DFSG-free and they simply don't know about it yet I think it 
> would be worth while altering them to meet the guidelines. Perhaps 
> you're right and some of the licenses already are DFSG-free. Please do 
> report back your findings! I'm afraid I'm a little out of my depth for 
> any more constructive discussion on the topic, I shy away from the 
> complicated legal details!

Most of the CC licenses are very obviously not DFSG-free.  AFAIK nobody 
ever explicitly thought "let's create non-DFSG-free licenses!", rather 
it was a consequence of intending to explore/exploit many points in the 
copyright spectrum outside of "all rights reserved".

It would be very nice if by and by-sa were certified as free, open, or 
whatever by Debian, OSI, and the FSF.  There certainly isn't any 
objection from CC to by and by-sa being so certified.  That said, we 
haven't made any postivie effort in that direction.

-- 
   Mike Linksvayer
   http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21



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