Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 25 May 2004, at 22:08, Evan Prodromou wrote:

> I was very pleased to see that ShareAlike seems to have been
> reasonably preserved.

My knee-jerk initial reaction:

	more complex, no representation, lots of music, no relicensing when 
deriving (yay!), more robust.

My more reflective reaction (from my weblog):

	[The licenses] cover music and combining works much better than the 
1.0 license, but miss the crucial "representation of authority to 
contribute" clause that makes people think about whether they really 
are allowed to release Star Wars as Open Content. This was too strict 
in the original license, but is present in a milder form in several 
other licenses, and should have been kept in a watered-down form IMHO.

	If you are making music or want a good license that allows the kind of 
cross-media explosion that Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" has seen, 
this is the license for you. If you are concerned about preventing the 
SCOs of this world attacking Free Culture, the Free Software 
Foundation's procedures for handling contributions may provide a good 
model.

	Congratulations to the CC team for getting these licenses out and for 
robustly enabling cross-media Free Culture.

- Rob.