Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Nathan Jones said:
> My previous message [Subject: Attribution (again)] received no replies,
> which is fine - the attribution discussion has probably been done to
> death and licences cannot be simply changed at the request of a few. :-)

sorry. yeah, it's been beat to death, unfortunately, with no resolution.

As far as I can see, Attribution is on by default, and there is no
clear, easy, way to turn it off. The "if supplied" clause makes it difficult
to put your name on your work without invoking Attribution. You could
offer the work anonymously and avoid invoking most attribution requirements,
but at the very least, the name of the document is supplied by the filename,
so that might invoke attribution of the original title.

However, I don't see Attribution as an issue for you.
If you want to license your work as NoDerivatives allowed,
then no one can modify your work, and so the negative side effects
of ever-accumulating attribution clauses is not possible.

Attribution is a problem if you want to give away a work such that
other people can modify it and make it their own. In that case,
as the work is transformed through more and more hands, the attribution
clauses become more burdensome as the work moves away from the original
author.

The most that could happen is people place your work in a Collective
work, in which case, you could pre-emptively state your request to
remove any Attribution requirements for Collective works.

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