Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 8 Feb 2004, at 18:22, Evan Prodromou wrote:

>  "In the event that your Derivative Work is based upon the Work and
>   one or more other works licensed under Creative Commons licenses
>   different from this one, you must include copy of, or the Uniform
>   Resource Identifier for, any Creative Commons license that contains
>   all License Elements contained in this License, plus those License
>   Elements contained in the license(s) governing the other work(s)"

Damn those commas! :-)

My initial reading was that all licenses must be included disjoint, but 
a closer reading does make it look like one license must be found for 
the union of the license terms.

This should be elegant and convenient, but is completely broken. It's 
as broken as it would be if Microsoft put a clause in their EULA which 
allows you to give copies of their software away for free to your 
friends.

I appreciate that having to include all licenses would leave us with a 
BSD-style copyright chain*, but frankly I would not use or recommend a 
license that allows people to steal the value of my work by changing 
the licensing of it against my wishes. And what happens when they want 
to sell it commercially if I contributed NC and they didn't? It's 
broken.

The removal of 5a and the addition of 4b are well-intentioned but 
disastrously mistaken. Convenience and exploitation are neither the 
benefactors nor the beneficiaries of Creative Commons, and Creative 
Commons should not seek to serve them. I really would recommend the OGL 
as an good example of how attribution and risk should be handled. 
Better a hundred squealing bloggers and graphic designer DJs than a 
single sued end-user or exploited item of content.

- Rob.

* http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html