Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Alex Schroeder <alex AT emacswiki.org>]

email AT greglondon.com writes:

> 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 Emacs Wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/) used to be FDL.
We later decided to change this.  Now it says:

    This work is licensed to you under version 2 of the GNU General
    Public License. Alternatively, you may choose to receive this work
    under any other license that grants the right to use, copy,
    modify, and/or distribute the work, as long as that license
    imposes the restriction that derivative works have to grant the
    same rights and impose the same restriction. For example, you may
    choose to receive this work under the GNU Free Documentation
    License, the CreativeCommons ShareAlike License, the XEmacs manual
    license, or similar licenses.

We had to wrestle with two issues:

1. How much protection do we need from copyright violators?
2. How did we go about the change?

I'll only go into issue 2, here.

What we did was show on the wiki in a prominent place that we planned
to change the license, plus a link to a discussion page, then we
waited one month or more, then we changed the license, kept a notice
in a prominent place, etc.  If a former contributor comes around now
and does not agree with the license change, we'll treat it like any
ol' copyright violation: Remove the offending content, apologize, and
continue business as usual.

I think the important part is that we spent significant time and
effort so that we can claim "due diligence" and we tried not to
violate the "spirit" of the original license, etc.

Alex.
-- 
.O.  http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/
..O  Schroeder's fourth law:
OOO  None of your friends and coworkers share your taste in music.