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cc-licenses - Extra restrictions on derivative works

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Extra restrictions on derivative works
  • Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 19:10:45 -0500

So, as far as I can tell, the new versions of the licenses have looser
restrictions on sharing-alike. In particular, it seems that's it'll be
OK to add additional restrictions to an sa license.

This seems to be based on the mistaken belief that someone using a
license is only concerned about _restrictions_ and not
_freedoms_. When I license something under the 1.0 sa license, I
guarantee some freedoms to the entire populace. Those freedoms are as
important to me as the restrictions are. No-one can take those away
from the general public -- not even creators of derivative works.

It's possible that I left off other restrictions because I just don't
care, but it's more likely I left them off because I specifically want
all people to be unrestricted with this work and all derivates.

With the 2.0 *-sa-* licenses, creators of derived works _will_ be able
to take those freedoms away. If someone took a work I created and
licensed under a 2.0 sa license, they could create a derivative work
and remove the freedom to use the work commercially. This doesn't seem
to be in the spirit of "sharing alike".

One possible solution is to reify the freedoms that are currently
implied by not having restrictions. In other words, if I license
something as ShareAlike-YesCommercial, that means I explicitly want to
allow commercial use, and creators of derivative works may not remove
that freedom. Similarly, if I license something as
ShareAlike-NoAttribution, meaning that no one has to give attribution,
even for derivative works. That seems less important to me, but
probably good for parallelism.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
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