Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

Evan Prodromou wrote:
> What bothers me is that the argument that was specifically about
> creating _additional_ licenses seems to have been reinterpreted into
> changing _all_ licenses. There is great value for publishers, users,
> creators of derivative works, and, yes, even original authors
> themselves in having the warranty section. Removing it for a minority
> of creators who don't feel comfortable with asserting and warrantying
> their right to publish makes the work of the rest of us less useful
> and worthwhile.

Until last week on this list I don't recall ever hearing anyone voice 
support for in-license warranties.  Their existence was people's #1 
complaint.  Coupled with the value in keeping the number of licenses 
small (and making choosing a license relatively simple), it seemed to 
make sense to remove the warranty section from all licenses.

Note that there is an opening in the 2.0 drafts for adding a warranty 
not specified in the license itself.  Perhaps given the recent 
pro-warranty feedback we should offer such a warranty concurrently with 
offering the 2.0 licenses.  I have a proposal on the cc-metadata list 
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-metadata (see last month's 
archives, sorry for no specific link, I'm offline at the moment) for 
dealing with the metadata.

> I realize my continual harping on this issue is probably pretty
> annoying. I apologize for that.

Not at all.  It would've been nice if you harped when others were 
harping on the opposite, but your feedback is valuable in any case.

Question: AFAIK none of the major open source licenses contain a 
CC1.0-like warranty clause.  Is this a problem?

--
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21