Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

MJ Ray wrote:
> It is very confusing, but I suspect it's probably not been raised 
> because it seemed "obvious" that the entire legalcode page was the 
> licence unless you looked at the source. If it hadn't been pointed out 
> to me (by neroden IIRC), I would never have known otherwise.

I don't know about that.  The disclaimer/trademark text is in a box and 
perhaps more importantly is not a numbered clause -- there's a reason it 
isn't section 9, for example, of 
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode>.  But whatever, 
some people find it confusing, be it 90% or 10%.  Point taken.

> I'm not alone. For example, the Subversion Book's copyright licence at 
> http://svnbook.red-bean.com/svnbook/ape.html includes a "CC 
> super-trademark" term in its licence. Thanks to part 7a, our licence 
> terminates if we make non-infringing use of CC's trademark. That hurts.

Easy solution, if you're worried: get the svnbook people to remove the 
full legal text from the book, or improve the presenation of same so 
that it is obvious the disclaimer/trademark thing isn't a part of the 
license.

> I've also recently seen it included in the CC copyright licence included 
> in a "Skeleton DocBook" file, which is a DocBook "template" file for 
> authors to use. Forseeably, this bug is spreading to any work which uses 
> that template. This really hurts.

See previous paragraph.

> Whether or not CC thinks their over-the-top trademark terms are part of 
> the licence, it seems that some authors do. This is why I think CC 
> should fix it and widely announce the fix. Surely it's not controversial 
> to produce a 2.1 or 2.0.1, if leaving the version alone is not possible?

We're definitely not going to produce a new version for this, which 
isn't even a part of the license.

The presentation issue will be fixed, in all honesty, in the fullness of 
time.

--
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21