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cc-licenses - Re: contribution from others, granting special permission

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: email AT greglondon.com
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Cc: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: contribution from others, granting special permission
  • Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 14:03:23 -0800 (PST)

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 16:13:09 -0500, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> e> But once you do this, you would have to get permission from
> e> every contributer if you wanted to relicense the work for
> e> someone.
>
> Another option is that you could ask contributors to assign
> copyright to you.

I was actually thinking of doing this with my Perl training
manual, but I couldn't find any examples of how to do this
anywhere on the web.

I wasn't sure if I could just put in the license something
that said "contributers agree to assign copyright of their
changes to the original author" or if I needed something
insane like a "click-through" website to accept submissions.
At that point I gave up and decided to punt.

Any pointers on how to do this?

The problem is that once you get multiple authors it becomes
more difficult to change the license or relicense it.
I think GNU considers this a feature that "locks" the work
into a copyleft license. But that assumes the license is
perfect for all situations for all time.

> e> If it is true, it seems that the Creative Common website
> e> doesn't really point this out to people interested in using
> e> their licenses because I didn't find it anywhere.
>
> God bless the people who did those great movies and cartoons. They
> rock and roll. However, they're kind of keyed to the simplest possible
> licensing scenarios -- one creator makes one version of one work. They
> don't really go into the intricacies of intertwingled networks of
> Derivative Works very well. But, as introductions, that may not be the
> best idea, anyways.

I didn't mean to knock the cartoons. They're actually the
best, shortest, simplest, description of how to use
a creative commons license, which is pretty amazing
when you throw in all the different options you can
select.

The cartoons used photographs as the example work to be licensed.
And a photograph is not something likely to be quite so dependent
on derived works as software is. Software always has bugs.
A software training manual is probably even more buggy than plain
code becase you can't compile your paragraphs and find errors.

Anyway, the mutual exclusion of "ShareAlike" and "relicensing"
wasn't in the Creative Commons FAQ area either.




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