Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>]

>>>>> "GOB" == Glenn Otis Brown <glenn AT creativecommons.org> writes:

    GOB> We had to pick a default rule to deal with the instance of
    GOB> two different SA works combined together to form a new
    GOB> work. We chose to have License Elements accumulate. We could
    GOB> have chosen the other way around, and required that the
    GOB> re-mixer license out under the less restrictive of the two
    GOB> licenses, but we had to go one way or the other. Going our
    GOB> way (cumulative), the original, less restricted file will
    GOB> always still be available, so we thought it was the superior
    GOB> of the two approaches.

This is based on the mistaken assumption that an sa or by-sa license
is somehow less restrictive than a by-sa-nc or sa-nc. It's not! The
implied restriction is that you can't take away the freedom that I
intended to give by licensing under sa rather than sa-nc or whatever
in the first place.

Here's a more concrete situation: a score of collaborators on
Wikitravel put together a fine guide to Boston, under the by-sa 2.0. A
commercial travel publisher creates a guide to New England, and
include our Boston guide. However, they release it under by-sa-nc
2.0. This means that:

     a) No other travel guide publisher will be able to use their
        changes
     b) Wikitravel will be unable to incorporate their changes, unless
        we relicense our work under by-sa-nc, too.

I realize that the stipulation is for remixing works under two
different CC sa licenses, but that can be trivially evaded by simply
calling the changes an original work under by-sa-nc -- perhaps
publishing them independently on an orphan Web page somewhere -- and
"remixing" them with the by-sa version.

Our original intention in using by-sa was to make the guides and all
derivatives free for _everyone_. Yet the new licenses would allow
people to take away the freedoms they're enjoying from other
people. That's broken.

I think there either needs to be a way to say, "No, you can't take
away freedoms we tried to build into our license", or mixing licenses
should be disallowed. Built-in freedoms are more important than ease
of mixing.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
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