[cc-licenses] Soft licenses -- compatible?

Roger Chrisman roger at rogerchrisman.com
Sun Feb 11 16:41:04 EST 2007


Some sites use a soft license statement instead of firm statements such 
as CC-by-sa or GFDL, as if to tie folks into the open content ideas, 
the open freedoms, without strictly tying folks into the exact wording 
of any one particular license. Is this help or hurt their cause?

Example (this one is from WikiTeach's "terms and conditions" page)  
http://www.wikiteach.org/index.php/wikiteach/wikiteachmgr/action/tc/

      "Intellectual Property
      "By posting content to WikiTeach, you are granting a share-alike 
full copyleft license on that content. A copyleft license uses 
copyright law in order to ensure that every person who receives a copy 
or derived version of a work can use, modify, and also redistribute 
both the work, and derived versions of the work. A full copyleft 
license imposes the requirement that any freedom that is granted 
regarding the original work or its copies, must be granted on exactly 
the same terms in any derived work. This allows maximum freedom for all 
users. Each lesson plan includes a copyleft statement that must be 
included in all copies and resulting works. This provides a mechanism 
to preserve the copyleft freedoms for subsequent users. -in other 
words, you give the next person the right to copy or change your 
content in any way-you are giving it away to the world out of the 
goodness of your heart and it belongs to everyone and no one."

WikiTeach has no other legalese style license statement, only the above.

(I feel I can post that license here as long as you understand that it's 
terms apply to itself and my posting of it here.)

* Are these soft license statements a good idea?

* Do they help solve the problem of incompatibility that hard licenses 
such as CC-by-sa and GFDL licenses have?


Thanks

-- 
Roger Chrisman  :-)          http://Wikigogy.org    -     free resources
                 for teachers of English as a second or foreign language
                      ...using CC-by-sa 2.5



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