Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Bayle Shanks <bshanks AT ucsd.edu>]

One rather different usage scenario for open content licenses is
wikis. 

* Wikis allow contributors to edit each others' words. 

* A wiki often ends up being a joint work of massive collaboration;
hundreds of people may have contributed to the work. Sometimes,
hundreds of people may have touched a single paragraph.

* Often, contributions are made anonymously.

* On some wikis,
it is permitted on a wiki for someone to erase the signature on signed
text, making the text anonymous. 

* Often, wikis consist of many distinct "pages". It is desirable to be
able to share individual pages without significant copyright legalese 
overhead.

* Each page may be
modified hundreds of times a year. Often, it is impractical to keep a
complete change history, or to require the change history to be
transmitted with the document.


We've been having discussion on wikis and trying to figure out which
licenses are best for us, but perhaps these discussions could benefit
by some review by someone who actually knows about law. 

For example,
it seems to some of us that the GFDL's changelog maintainance
requirements are too strict for wikis (although WikiPedia, one of the largest 
wikis in the
world, disagrees); but often we want to make the text available to other
GFDL sites. What is the appropriate wording for a license that makes
contributions to the site available under both the GFDL and a CC
license, while not forcing the wiki site to maintain a changelog according
to the GFDL's terms?

In general, we just want to be able to take content from one Open
Content wiki site and copy it to another one. 

Ideally, we want our
content to be available to other sites, whether CC or GFDL, and we
want to import content from either CC or GFDL.


More discussion on open content licenses for wikis may be found at the
following sites:

*
http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn%27t_GFDL
* http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/CategoryCopyright
* http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?CategoryCopyright


Thanks,
  bayle