Development of Creative Commons licenses

[MJ Ray <mjr AT dsl.pipex.com>]

Mike, thanks for your reply. I'm sorry that you don't see this as a 
problem which CC should try to fix on a published schedule. I'll try 
to explain why I don't think that position is correct.

On 2004-07-06 02:21:58 +0100 Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org> 
wrote:

> MJ Ray wrote:
> > [...] 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

That doesn't display in non-colour browsers, especially things like 
lynx or html2text that people are likely to use to dump the legalcode 
into a text document. Using only visual styling and HTML source 
comments is not obvious markup. I think this is probably covered by 
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/#gl-color

> and perhaps more importantly is not a numbered clause [...]

The lead-in text is not a numbered clause either, but seems important 
to the licence.

> 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.

There is no benefit to me from lobbying svnbook to switch licences in 
that way, at this time.

> > 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.

There is not a whelk's chance in a supernova that I am going to be 
able to track down all distributors of the Skeleton DocBook file. I do 
not have CC's visibility. Can you try to get CC to clean up after its 
mistake, please?

Yes, mistake. It seems fairly obvious that the obscure marking of the 
trademark terms is a (minor) mistake, not a deliberate decision of CC. 
It seems unreasonable to say that users should fix this for you, 
especially when the CC-controlled source of the problem remains 
unfixed. It just wastes user time, stomping these out, if CC won't 
discourage more appearing.

> > [...] 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.

I suggested that it would not need a new version, as the trademark 
terms aren't even a part of the licence, but you seemed to suggest 
that isn't possible.

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

On the one hand, this seems to be dismissed as a trivial bug. On the 
other hand, this is dismissed as being a non-trivial bug. Why is this? 
Can we conclude that CC core members don't see fixing this bug in CC's 
implementation as a worthwhile use of time?

Please cc me on replies.
--
MJR/slef    My Opinion Only and not of any group I know
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing
"To be English is not to be baneful / To be standing by
the flag not feeling shameful / Racist or partial..."
                                            (Morrissey)