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cc-licenses - Re: Creative Commons Attribution license element

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: MJ Ray <mjr AT dsl.pipex.com>
  • Subject: Re: Creative Commons Attribution license element
  • Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 18:21:58 -0700

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




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