Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Nelson Pavlosky said:
> Is it just me, or is it no longer possible to choose a CC-license
> without Attribution?  You used to be able to choose a plain old SA license
> And the license choosing menu won't let you turn off Attribution.  Why?

Because CC wanted to reduce the number of license permutations
and most people were choosing Attribution, so they decided to
roll it into all licenses. Total licenses now halved.

turning off attribution is possible for some attribution,
but apparently not all.

:: You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work

I'm not sure if copyright notices are considered part of the
attribution requirements. they have to remain intact, but
I don't >think< they have to be "comparable" in "prominence"
to any deriving author's copyright notice exists.

:: and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium
:: or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym
:: if applicable) of the Original Author ***if supplied***;

name attribution required "if supplied".

:: the title of the Work ***if supplied***;

title attribution required "if supplied"

:: to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier,
:: ***if any***, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work,
:: unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing
:: information for the Work;

URL attribution required "if supplied"

:: and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the
:: use of the Work in the Derivative Work

There is no "if any" or "if supplied", so apparently
derivative works must always attribute the original work,
even if the original author doesn't require it.

:: Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner;
:: provided, however, that in the case of a Derivative Work
:: or Collective Work, at a minimum such credit will appear
:: where any other comparable authorship credit appears and
:: in a manner at least as prominent as such other comparable
:: authorship credit.

The odd bit is that it seems that if you have your
name, title, and URL on your original work, it is
NOT POSSIBLE to waive attribution, since attribution
is turned on by the "if supplied" clause.

I don't see much of a problem with this for
NC, ND, EDU-only, Sampling, and their permutations.
They're Market Economy licenses or "Free Sample"
licenses, so attribution makes sense for them.

The ShareAlike license, however, seems to be
negatively impacted by the decision to roll
attribution into the licenses. Since ShareAlike
is a Gift Economy license, the burden of
accumulating attribution clauses could become
too much for any long term project to bear.

-- 
"Impatient Perl" => Perl geek in about a week.
http://www.greglondon.com/iperl/index.html
Available in GNU-FDL, HTML, PDF, and paperback.