Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Watanabe Tomoaki" <tomoaki_watanabe_cc AT hotmail.com>]

Thomas;

Thank you very much for sharing your opinion with me. That prompted me to 
read the license again, think, and well, came to a different 
view...(different from the one I had, as well as the one you suggested.)

So may I offer a different take? 

As I see, it seems there is no provision in the CC-by license term to 
prohibit the creator of a certain type of Derivative Work from releasing 
that Derivative Work under public domain, or any other license that the 
person prefer.

The types of Derivative Works that I am talking about is "translation, 
musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture 
version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation"- the 
list of specific activities that is specified as Derivative Work in the 
license. 

I am not sure if public display, public performance, and public digital 
performance are also defined as "Derivative Work" in the license. In either 
case, I think my opinion does not apply to this group of Derivative Works. 
Those Derivative Works seem to have to be released always under the same 
term - CC-by. 

But for other types of Derivative Works such as translation, 
fictionalization, etc., the license puts a lot less restrictions. These 
types of Derivative Works are restricted mostly by 4b, not 4a of the 
license. (The only exception is the requirement of "removal of 
attribution"at the very end of 4a. that specifically applies to Derivative 
Works.) 

And the 4b requires that "keep intact all copyright notices for the 
Work"but not the license terms. 

4a, which does not seem to apply to translation, fictionalization, etc., 
requires "You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and 
to the disclaimer of warranties."

So, combined, I get the impression that while things like public 
performance of the (original) Work has to be under the same license term, 
things like translation and fictionalization is not restricted at all in 
terms of the choice of license. As a result, one can choose public domain 
or some others. 

For example, I know there are some people who translated creative commons 
web pages. Those translated CC web pages are released under CC-by. Is it 
okay for those people to release translated web pages as public domain? 

This has been kind of an unanswered question so far, and I thought the 
answer could be yes...but I could well be wrong... hope someone could give 
me some more insights. 

best, 

Tomos

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