Development of Creative Commons licenses

[email AT greglondon.com]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004 15:27:56 -0500, "Brian Clark" wrote:
> what happens if three months later a user now providing photos 
> (perhaps not realizing it) as public domain changes their mind, 
> and changes the CC license (automatically across all their photos) 
> to be "some rights reserved." Are people using it under rights 
> that weren't reserved before under a burden to discover that
> change?

[I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.]

My understanding of Copyright law would say that
if the work is distributed PD, those distributions
remain PD.

Changing the license at a later time affects the
work from that point forward. Any previous licenses
remain in effect for those previous versions.

for example, if you license a work to me SA,
but then later you decide to change the license
on the work to "All rights reserved", my distribution
of the work is still SA, and I can copy, distribute,
and create derived works under the SA license.

Otherwise a "bait and switch" is possible.

"Oh, now my CC-SA song is really popular, I'm going
to revoke EVERYONE'S license to my work, including
the CC-SA version you downloaded last week, and 
change it to All Rights Reserved."