Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>]

So, probably the main reason we're using the by-sa license rather than
the GFDL license at Wikitravel is the low overhead. People using our
articles can just reference the by-sa license using an URL rather than
distribute 10 pages of legalese license text with every 1-2 page
article. This makes the by-sa license much better for printed material
(something that's not highlighted, by the way, on creativecommons.org).

At gnu.org, however, they strongly deprecate this:

   http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#OtherWorks

I quote:

   "For other kinds of works, we recommend you consider the licenses
   proposed by Creative Commons.

   However, when using them, we strongly urge you to reject the option
   to reference the license with a link to a URL. You cannot take for
   granted that the same URL will still function ten years from now;
   fifty years from now, URLs as they exist today may be entirely
   obsolete. [...]"

For us at Wikitravel, worrying about 50 years from now matters less
than having to print out 10-12 pages of extra text for every copy of
an article.

But this _is_ a good point. Copyright lasts for on the order of 100
years; the Web has been around for on the order of 10 years. It's kind
of naive to expect things in 2013 to be anything like they are in
2003. In 1993, if I wanted to tell you how to get to an electronic
document, I would have given you the name of the CompuServe forum it
was in. Now, nobody knows what CompuServe was.

I wonder if there's any way to keep the great convenience of an URL
reference for the license, but still future-proof the CC licenses for
when URLs, or the Web, or whatever, don't exist.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
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