Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

IANAL, TINLA, etc.

On Wednesday, May 26, 2004, at 12:04PM, Romain d'Alverny <aperio AT free.fr> 
wrote:

>Le mer 26/05/2004 à 08:28, Rob Myers a écrit :
>> On 26 May 2004, at 02:24, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>> 
>> > If you want to disclaim ownership the public domain is for you, and is 
>> > a clear option via <http://creativecommons.org/license/>.
>> 
>> The public domain is not share-alike.
>
>Sure, but how do you (practically) prevent a work, on which no one
>reclaim ownership, from being used and not "shared-alike" ?

You don't. IMHO I believe you may have misunderstood what nonattribution 
means in the CC Licenses.

Not requiring attribution of something that you own is not the same as giving 
up ownership of it. Non-attribution is saying "I own this, I'll give you some 
restricted rights, but don't print my name on the cover". This is very 
different from making something public domain, which is saying "I don't own 
this, do what you want with it".

>Any restriction comes only from a person having legitimate authority on
>the work (the author).

Absolutely. This is how the CC licenses work.

>If the author disclaim ownership, how, and why could he restrict uses of
>such a work ?

This is not what nonattribution means. If the author dedicates their work to 
the public domain, they cannot restrict use. That is precisely why the public 
domain is not a substitute for nonattribution sharealike (and why the public 
domain has nothing to do with nonattribution in general).

I think this conversation may shed some light on why 97% of people avoided 
nonattribution. Please can this be taken into consideration for CC 3 or the 
re-introduction of ~BY . :-)

- Rob.