Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Glenn Otis Brown" <glenn AT creativecommons.org>]

Hi Mike,

This is a good point. Thanks for taking the time to write in. I'm in the
middle of considering a few different versioning issues, and I'll
definitely put this one in the hopper. The grant-back or share alike
provision may indeed need more clarity or more direct explanation. 

Please be sure to let us know when your guides go out. Thanks again.

Glenn

On Wed, 01 Oct 2003 09:48:32 -0700, "Michael A. Olson"
<mao AT sleepycat.com> said:
> Hello,
> 
> We've done the legal review we need to do of the attribution/share-alike
> license, and we will use it for the Berkeley DB XML Getting Started
> Guides.  Thanks for your hard work in making this license available to
> the community.
> 
> I want to offer one suggestion that came out of our review.
> 
> I'm referring here to the actual license text at
> 
>       http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/legalcode
> 
> The intent of the license is to make a document available for use,
> modification and redistribution, provided that everyone down the line
> follows exactly those same rules.  This is accomplished by combining
> the license grant in section 3 with the restrictions in 4.
> 
>  From our point of view, we want to make our content available to others,
> and to be able to redistribute their improvements from our site.  As
> a result, we look at the license as a grant to third parties with a
> required grant-back to us under the same terms.
> 
> It is a curious property of this license that the grant-back is actually
> spelled out in the restrictions.  That is, 4(a) and 4(b) include the
> language "only under the terms of this license".  This accomplishes the
> intent, but not as clearly as it could.
> 
> I suggest adding a paragraph after 3(d) to the grant, which says
> 
>       Any distribution of this Work, or of a Derivative Work, shall be
>       under the terms of this License.  All parties, including the
>       Original Author, shall have the these rights and obligations with
>       respect to such distribution.
> 
> I believe this improves clarity by making the grant-back explicit in the
> part of the license that deals with grants.  It took some noodling by our
> attorneys to get comfortable with the structure here, and the additional
> clarity would help.
>                                       mike
> 
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---------------------
Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director
Creative Commons
glenn AT creativecommons.org
+1.650.723.7572 (telephone)
+1.415.336.1433 (mobile)