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cc-licenses - Re: additional terms to by-nc-sa

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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: Alvin Oga <alvin AT Mail.Linux-Consulting.com>
  • Subject: Re: additional terms to by-nc-sa
  • Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 19:34:17 -0700

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




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