Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 16 Feb 2004, at 22:51, Rob Myers wrote:

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

That should have been "after the CC licenses", which I've released all 
my art under. I haven't OGL'ed or BSD'ed anything. :-)

> This is very important, as the SCO debacle [...] show.

By which I don't mean that SCO have a point, I mean that the license 
doesn't prevent them claiming to the press that they have a point. 
Quoting Groklaw 
(http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040217231311568):

" SCO has been trying to tell the world that the no warranty provision 
in the GPL is the same as no indemnification for IP claims. It's not 
the same thing at all. It's saying if there is a problem with the code, 
sorry, but you got it for free. Microsoft's EULAs say very similar 
things. That's a clause that is in the GPL because individual coders 
are really not in a financial position to provide tech support. But the 
no warranty clause does not intend to say that if there is an IP issue, 
the end user is the one to be sued. Only SCO thinks that way"

Putting something in the license to prevent this sort of 
"misunderstanding" without it being so strongly worded as to upset 
bloggers is good. (I'm not sure about Groklaw's take on the clause 
being to avoid "tech support", though...)

Groklaw also mentioned the FSF's fairly stringent requirements for 
signing over of IP for their Open projects (another section 5 :-) ):

        http://www.fsf.org/prep/maintain_5.html

"Before incorporating significant changes, make sure that the person 
who wrote the changes has signed copyright papers and that the Free 
Software Foundation has received and signed them. We may also need a 
disclaimer from the person's employer."

This is handled externally to the license, so might support the idea of 
this sort of thing being best handled external to the license. But I'd 
argue that for general practice it's weaker as it's something people 
can (choose to) forget to do.

So I would still argue for a revised clause 5a  along the lines of the 
WOtC and IBM licenses mentioned in this thread.

- Rob.