Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Sunir Shah" <sunir AT sunir.org>]

Hey,

Quick introduction. I am the Editor of MeatballWiki, an
online community about online communities so to speak.

     http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl

After a lengthy argument about copylefting the site 
(I am against that), someone suggested I join this list. 
Going through the archive, I read this

Amberleigh Young:
> I would like for my users to retain the ability to use 
> their content in any way, while retaining for myself 
> the ability to exploit the content in other media, with 
> attribution to the original creators.

I had a similar problem a long time ago, so we ended up
writing

    http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWikiCopyright

I don't know if it would hold up in court. The idea was
the state the absolute minimal set of rights we needed to
operate a wiki. It follows from the Berne Convention, 
Article 2 that also provides compilation copyrights.

    (5) Collections of literary or artistic works such as 
        encyclopaedias and anthologies which, by reason of 
        the selection and arrangement of their contents, 
        constitute intellectual creations shall be protected 
        as such, without prejudice to the copyright in each 
        of the works forming part of such collections. 

    From http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/2.html

Note that we use the phrase "Meatball's systems" which may
be more than the wiki in question. Also, we reserved the
right to redistribute material as timestamped snapshots,
but I am very uncomfortable with doing so for pages that
were not explicitly created for that purpose.

Even if it were illegal, it may be immoral. Copyrights are
about morality, not legality.

SS