Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Michael A. Olson" <mao AT sleepycat.com>]

Evan Prodromou wrote:

> 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?

I'm speaking by analogy from use of dual licensing for software, which
is a topic I understand pretty well.

Your summary of the issues with immiscibility (God, that's a fun word
to type!) of licenses was excellent.  You've captured the issues and
the difficulties in dual licensing pretty accurately.

An attorney who specializes in intellectual property law would be in
a better position than I to comment on your final conclusion.  I
suspect, though, that as the IP owner, you can put whatever conditions
and grant whatever rights you like to the work you publish.  In
particular, you could say that derived works (a) could be dual-
licensed at the option of the downstream author, or (b) must be
dual-licensed.  Unfortunately, condition (b) likely runs afoul of
the "no further restrictions" language of the GFDL.

I'm not aware of anyone who does that -- it would be interesting to
see someone try it, and to find out whether it works.

Let me offer one correction to your third point, even if the work
is released under a single restrictive license.

If you write the original draft of an article, and then I amend that
draft, you and I can jointly agree to do whatever we want with the
resulting work, including dual-licensing it.  Neither of us can do
that unilaterally, but if we talk to each other and agree, we can.
We are the creators and IP owners under copyright law, so we have
the legal standing to do whatever we want.

                                        mike