Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

Alvin Oga wrote:
> i've been looking over the by-nc-sa license
>         http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0
>
> i was wondering ...  how does one add additional terms
> and conditions to the license ?

Evan's reply 
<https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2004-June/000956.html> 
is correct -- you can add whatever terms you want, you just can't call 
the result a Creative Commons license.

I understand that lots of people would like to tweak the licenses in one 
way or another that we can't accomodate.  AFAIK most end up using a 
standard CC license after considering the matter.  If tweak a license, 
you lose at least three major benefits you get from using a standard CC 
license:

- Your new license isn't widely understood or trusted.  People have to 
actually read it to be comfortable with it.  That imposes a very high 
cost on licensors.

- Your license may not be legally solid.  The existing CC licenses have 
been written by top law firms. (Aside: Someone once observed that if CC 
counted value in a manner similar to the RIAA, we'd have created many 
billions of dollars of value -- multiply the market rate of the time 
donated by very expensive lawyers working pro bono on the licenses by 
the total number of people using CC licenses...)

- Whatever works are licensed using your new license aren't likely to be 
cataloged, searched, or otherwise exposed by software that looks for CC 
licenses.

> specifically, i'd like to specificy things like:
>
> venue ... that all legal disputes will be according to the
> 	  state of california, santa clara county 
>
> address ... all correspondences comes into our offices 
>  	or legal service agents for legal issues
>
> attorney ... should also be included so that those that do
>  	might otherwise want to get involved wont be scared away 
> 	because there's no attorney's fees clauses in it

To my understanding you'd have to modify the license to include these 
things.  But as above, you might want to think hard about whether you 
really need them.  Regarding venue and address, I'd think they wouldn't 
be hugely important as you're the licensor, and you'd be the one sending 
legal notices to others, not vice versa.

Note of course that I'm not a lawyer, I don't give legal advice, etc.

> non-commercial ... that could mean different things to different 
> 	folks so i'd like to more explicitly define it

If you want to grant rights for limited commercial use, e.g., you can 
sell 10 copies, but not more, you could grant such rights completely 
separate from the license.

Also, FWIW, I understand that James Grimmelmann is working on better 
explanations of what non-commercial actually means.  You can see some 
posts from him on this list and cc-community, e.g., 
<https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2004-June/000968.html>. 
 If you have specific questions about non-commercial you might ask them 
here.

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