Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Alvin Oga <alvin AT Mail.Linux-Consulting.com>]

hi ya mike

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

> 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.

that's understandable :-)
 
> - 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.

legal advise usually costs an arm and leg and using poor agreements will
cost even more later in blood battles ( court )
 
> - 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...)

finding the "reasonable attorneys" is the trick ..
a tradeoff between they want to do this type of work vs ones that wants
their $400+/hr fees

> > 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.

the venue issue is critical in my book, as i dont want ot have to fly
to delaware to show up in court .. .since most corp are incorporated
in delaware

and attorney's that are willing to work on contingency will be
looking for "attorney" clauses .. and if oyu pay them directly,
you want to make sure you get your legal fees paid by the losing party

and similarly, if oyu lose the case, you dont want to pay the
sue-happy-customer's attorneys fee which makes "attorney clauses" a 
toss up as to whether yu want it or not and/or if you know oyu can win 
every frivolous lawsuit thrown your direction

>  But as above, you might want to think hard about whether you 
> really need them.

one usually doesn't need it ( additional clauses/clarification )  till
it's too late :-)

>  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.

umm..... i'd guess you haven't had the luxury to show up in court yet

- you have to defend your license ..
- you have to defend yourself against their crazy claims

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

no problem ...

> > 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.

i think clarification of "non-commercial use" is an important issue
because "commercial use" seems ot mean different things to different
people

> 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>. 

cool, but it's the typical kinko printing copyright question or not
which involves a 3rd party  vs  the "licensor and user" non-commercial
usage that i want to clarify 

>   If you have specific questions about non-commercial you might ask them 
> here.

i'm thinking, the other way to add those venue, definition, attorney fee
would be to add it into a "FAQ" but that would NOT be part of the 
license, which means is it a legally binding agreement ??

with venue, its defined by law, where on can and cannot file suit
and most corp are incorporated in delaware so guess where you will
be heading to answer suits against you

thanx
alvin