Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Richard Cobbett" <charybdis AT deja-x.co.uk>]

In the case of reports, presumably the reason they're reading is to either
integrate the results into their own cases or to build on your research, in
which case they're going to take the credit for the additional work. As for
strategies and business plans, it's unlikely that your experiences are going
to fit completely seamlessly into their requirements, making them more
useful for educational purposes when people are writing up their own
specific plans, rather than being used as a straight-up template. The result
of that is always going to be their strategy rather than yours, even if they
copy/pasted every last word of the original document.

In both cases, the fact that you could still have them for the public peanut
gallery on your main site gives you a way of showing people if and when your
work has been misrepresented, and exactly how. If it's an accident, that
should be sufficient to resolve any problems - and if it's as the result of
anyone being malicious, well, a CC sticker's not exactly going to scare
someone away in the first place. At least you could say quite simply "Look,
it's been out there since whenever. Look on iArchive or the Google Cache or
this FTP site, or these quotes on our forum - we have nothing to hide."

Ultimately, if you're worried about unofficial docs, the obvious thing is to
drop Attribution completely and focus on Derivs. That doesn't stop the other
party crediting you if they choose (and if they're using your research, or
using your company as a case study, they're going to have to just to provide
context) without forcing them to outright put your name on something that
you may not approve of.

__________________
Richard Cobbett | http://www.richardcobbett.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: cc-licenses-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:cc-licenses-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Black
Sent: 16 March 2004 12:13
To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Derivative works and noting changes

Hi All

I represent a non-profit organisation in South Africa doing work in 
promoting open source software in South Africa. We prove that open 
source software works within various contexts and then encourage risk 
averse organisations to continue our projects that work.

Now, we want to relase all our strategy documents, reports, etc. under a 
CC license so that others can benefit from our work. The licence which 
seems to fit most naturally is the Attribution licence.

Now, how do you enhance this license so that if an organisation makes 
changes to our original docs, all the changes are clearly indicated. For 
example, we're happy if people use our docs to develop their own 
strategies based on our work - what we don't want people to do is make 
changes to our strategy docs and then distribute them, without the 
recepient knowing that these are now 'unofficial' docs?

Help with this would be great appreciated.

-Thomas

-- 
Thomas Black
Open Source Program Manager
The Shuttleworth Foundation
Tel. +27 21 9701208
Fax. +27 21 9701209
http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/oscp/

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