Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>]

Hi, folks. So, I need some help -- badly.

I'm one of the founders of Wikitravel, the free world-wide travel
guide. When we started Wikitravel, one of our models was Wikipedia
(http://www.wikipedia.org/), the free encyclopedia. Wikipedia uses the
GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), mostly because that's what was
available for copyleft licenses when Wikipedia started.

For Wikitravel, we use the cc by-sa license. We felt that the GFDL
didn't meet our goals for the site -- specifically, the high
requirements for extra stuff that has to be distributed with a
document. For details, see:

          
http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn%27t_GFDL

Our big problem is that, even though they have very similar goals, the
GFDL and by-sa are not miscible. This is kind of a hassle, since
there's plenty of content from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia
(http://www.wikimedia.org/) sites that would be helpful for us to
use. But we figured that it would be better to make things easy for
the people who use our content than to make it easy for Wikitravel
contributors.

Just to underline: THE IMMISCIBILITY OF THE GFDL AND COPYLEFT CREATIVE
COMMONS LICENSES IS A PROBLEM FOR ME AND MANY OTHERS EACH DAY. Not a
theoretical problem, not a nit-picking bit of amateur license
legalism. Whoever is working on the next versions of the CC license,
please take note.

Now, here's my main problem: the above isn't good enough for some of
our contributors. They want to make the content they contribute to
Wikitravel available to sites that use the GFDL, even if they
(Wikitravel contributors) can't use that content back. In other words,
they want to dual-license their contributions to Wikitravel: available
under the by-sa or under the GFDL, according to the desires of the
Deriver.

I think this is a real tar pit of legal issues. As far as I can
tell...

1) It is possible for an original Creator to dual license a Work.

2) Someone creating a Derivative Work -- a Deriver? -- must choose one
   and only one of the two licenses. The Derivative Work _cannot_ be
   dual licensed -- it must use one of the two exclusively.

3) Once a Deriver has released a Derivative Work, no one -- not even
   the original Creator -- can take that Derivative Work and make
   another dual-licensed work.

Is that a fair assessment? Is there any way for Creators to specify
that derived works can be dual-licensed, also?

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide