Development of Creative Commons licenses

[pitrp AT wg78.de (Peter Prohaska)]

On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 09:23:39AM +0100, Rob Myers wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 26, 2004, at 07:49AM, Peter Prohaska <pitrp AT wg78.de> 
> wrote:
> 
> >I think that point (2) dangerous.  I personally prefer licenses that
> >under no circumstances change their meaning.
> >
> >At least the open source software folks among us will know the debate
> >and notice that this is one of the major differences between GPL and OSL
> >i.e.
> >
> >Be prepared to loose users here.
> 
> More users would be lost if problems that emerge in a license couldn't be 
> fixed.

As far as i understand the process, the problem can only be fixed by
getting rid of the old license.
As soon as you have published content under one version of the license,
you have no further influence on what happens to it. The only thing you
can do is to republish your work under another license, so that as soon
as you create a derivate of you own work, the old license cannot be used
on the new portions.

> This is not the major issue that some people have with the GPL, the main 
> issue is the sharealike aspect of it. People seem to prefer to give their 
> work to Microsoft for no cost using the BSD-style licenses. Whatever.

Not "the major" issue of course, but an important little difference.
Concerning "to give their work to Microsoft": I would rather put it
like "ease reuse of work without restrictions and live with the risc of
misuse".


> The upgrade caluse is vital and is common to most non-BSD licenses, whether 
> sharealike or not. 
> The reason why is very simple. If your "OSL" license was broken, would you 
> want it fixed? 

Sure, but the difficult question is what broken actually means. Take the
now unavailable "by" clause as an example or the additions of the more
music specific wordings... What if thos new additions break the license
and i only licensed an image?

So is a "broken for music" license also a "broken for images" license?

> You now have a problem. How do you get the fix out? 
> 
> You can:
> 
> 1. Change all your files and notify all your users that they must upgrade. 
> I hope you inserted a clause requiring everyone who downloads your 
> software/content sends you a forwarding address.

The problem is that they can do with the downloaded content what they
belive is right.  It is their right to download a new copy as it gets
available or not. As soon as they downloaded it with a copyright notice,
i cannot change this notice anyways.

> 2. Have the update happen automatically by the terms of the license.

This is not what is going to happen. The only thing that happens is that
they know that they may use a different license as soon as one appears,
but the license will never change automatically. The only way to get
this effect would be by enforcing to distibute the content _only_ under
the latest version of the license at the time of plublication. But that
is hard to achieve for a movie database i.e.

> Changes need to be compatible, but they may be necessary, and when they are 
> they need making effectively.

Exactly. But isn't that a request for a clause that allows
redistribution under a compatible/similar license?

> That said, could Fox buy CC and release a CC 3.0 that made all the work 
> theirs? Or the FSF get bought by MS and have GPL 3.0 as a EULA? You could 
> still use the 2.0 licenses, but is this a possibility even if only in the 
> realm of FUD?

A bizzare scenario, but i understand it like this:

1. CC changes owner and becomes MadCC.
2. ManCC releases CC 3.0 with a clause that everyone using the CC 3.0
   thereby grants ManCC unrestricted usage rights.
3. Every product that was was CC 2.0 _may_ be redistributed under CC 3.0
4. ManCC can now redistribute any content that it can get hold of under
   the CC 3.0 licencse and i.e. therby ship round an NC clause.

IANAL, TINLA... regards,
  peter.

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