Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 16 Feb 2004, at 22:10, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

> I'm glad that you posted that clause from the OGL -- I was going to 
> look at it, RSN.

IMHO the OGL is something of a masterpiece of Open licensing. It has 
the right balance between robustness and readability, is designed to 
allow composition and derivation of works, and was the result of some 
very clear and passionate thinking about protecting both freedom and 
sales in a particular industry.

The OGL and the revised BSD license are my favourite licenses.

> I note that the IBM's CPL http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl.php 
> has a very similar clause, 2d:
>
> "Each Contributor represents that to its knowledge it has sufficient 
> copyright rights in its Contribution, if any, to grant the copyright 
> license set forth in this Agreement."

Yes, that sounds about equivalent.

> It does sound a lot less scary than the explicit warranty in CC 1.0 
> licenses.  Is it materially different?

IANAL but yes because you are only making claims about your *own* work 
rather than work that you have received.

> Is "representing" less strong or otherwise distinct from "warranting"?

IANAL, so I couldn't say. But you'll notice that even if the clause was 
phrased very strongly, you are still only claiming that you have 
produced your own work, which is implicit in the fact that you are 
publishing it under your own name. The important thing is to 
compartmentalise risk rather than take it on from contributors and pass 
it on to consumers where at all possible. This is very important, as 
the SCO debacle and NASA's license requirements show.

- Rob.