Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Hi Evan,

We're planning on versioning this winter, and making our share-alike
provision more compatible with similar licenses is at the top of the list
of changes. So rest assured that we're on the case. This email will help
a lot as we work through the draft. Let me think some more about your
specific questions -- will respond soon. I don't think things are
insoluble under the current licenses, but we're going try to iron this
out in advance with the new licenses.

Will keep you posted.

Glenn

On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 11:08:46 -0500, "Evan Prodromou"
<evan AT wikitravel.org> said:
> 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
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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)