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cc-licenses - Re: Why do you have to chose the "Attribution" option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?

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  • From: James Grimmelmann <james.grimmelmann AT yale.edu>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: Why do you have to chose the "Attribution" option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?
  • Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 11:20:44 -0700

At 02:21 AM 8/15/2004, Gottfried Hofmann wrote:
Hello,

I know only 4% chosed not to use the "Attribution" option, but is that really a reason to remove this possibility?

See
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2004-June/000943.html
for a previous discussion on this list on the topic.

And see
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2004-June/000963.html
for a recommended solution for those who don't want attribution: provide a permissive set of attribution information.

In my opinion, freedom is also freedom of choise. So a license that aims to be "free" should also give the authors the possibility to customize it towards freedom and not force them to chose restrictions they may not want even though the number of authors not chosing this restriction is rather low.

Creative Commons licenses don't force licensors to do anything, since they're always voluntary choices by licensors. Given that, it's best for the licenses to err slightly on the side of being too restrictive. You can always declare that you're waiving one of your rights under the license; it's impossible to add a restriction back in once you offer a license.

If you don't care about attribution, you have at least two good choices with a license that includes BY:

1) Do not supply authorship information with your work. This means that the "if supplied" trigger in the attribution licenses doesn't kick in, and no requirements are placed on the licensee.
2) Explicitly supply a "my name or no name at all" clause, as in the suggestion above.

There are big advantages to making all licenses BY and then allowing authors to waive their attribution rights. First, it means fewer licenses, so that the complexity of choosing one is reduced. Second, people will have to do the (minimal) legwork of checking the author information and citing it in any redistribution or derivative work anyway, so that it doesn't add any complexity for them if some works might not have to be cited back to the author. And third, fewer licenses means that the ShareAlike licences are more compatible with each other: you no longer have to work about BY-SA and plain SA being incompatible. Instead, some contributors to BY-SA care about attribution while others don't.

Currently, I'll stick to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/ :-)

The one "problem" this solution poses for you is that _downstream_ licensors don't have the freedom to choose between a BY license and a non-BY license.. But wait! Under a plain ShareAlike license, such as you're using, they don't have a choice, either. They can't get attribution, even if they want it.

But if the underlying license is BY-SA, then each contributor has to "require" attribution at the level of the license, but is free to do the same thing you do, and waive it as a personal matter. This means that the work rolls along, accumulating contributors and derivatives, of whom some retain attribution credit and others do not. That sounds like excellent freedom of choice to me.

There also seems to be another problem with the current attribution terms:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01193.html

Evan Prodromou, the author of that message, has been an active and regular contributor to this list. He's been keeping this list appraised of significant issues from the debian-legal list and been doing a lot to keep Creative Commons informed of these concerns. But thanks for pointing it out again--the best way that CC can learn about people's issues with the licenses is for someone to speak up.

James




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