Development of Creative Commons licenses

[James Grimmelmann <james.grimmelmann AT yale.edu>]

At 02:21 AM 8/15/2004, Gottfried Hofmann wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I know only 4% chosed not to use the "Attribution" option, but is that 
> really a reason to remove this possibility?

See
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2004-June/000943.html
for a previous discussion on this list on the topic.

And see
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2004-June/000963.html
for a recommended solution for those who don't want attribution: provide a 
permissive set of attribution information.

> In my opinion, freedom is also freedom of choise. So a license that aims 
> to be "free" should also give the authors the possibility to customize it 
> towards freedom and not force them to chose restrictions they may not want 
> even though the number of authors not chosing this restriction is rather low.

Creative Commons licenses don't force licensors to do anything, since 
they're always voluntary choices by licensors.  Given that, it's best for 
the licenses to err slightly on the side of being too restrictive.  You can 
always declare that you're waiving one of your rights under the license; 
it's impossible to add a restriction back in once you offer a license.

If you don't care about attribution, you have at least two good choices 
with a license that includes BY:

1)  Do not supply authorship information with your work.  This means that 
the "if supplied" trigger in the attribution licenses doesn't kick in, and 
no requirements are placed on the licensee.
2)  Explicitly supply a "my name or no name at all" clause, as in the 
suggestion above.

There are big advantages to making all licenses BY and then allowing 
authors to waive their attribution rights.  First, it means fewer licenses, 
so that the complexity of choosing one is reduced.  Second, people will 
have to do the (minimal) legwork of checking the author information and 
citing it in any redistribution or derivative work anyway, so that it 
doesn't add any complexity for them if some works might not have to be 
cited back to the author.  And third, fewer licenses means that the 
ShareAlike licences are more compatible with each other: you no longer have 
to work about BY-SA and plain SA being incompatible.  Instead, some 
contributors to BY-SA care about attribution while others don't.

> Currently, I'll stick to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/ :-)

The one "problem" this solution poses for you is that _downstream_ 
licensors don't have the freedom to choose between a BY license and a 
non-BY license..  But wait!  Under a plain ShareAlike license, such as 
you're using, they don't have a choice, either.  They can't get 
attribution, even if they want it.

But if the underlying license is BY-SA, then each contributor has to 
"require" attribution at the level of the license, but is free to do the 
same thing you do, and waive it as a personal matter.  This means that the 
work rolls along, accumulating contributors and derivatives, of whom some 
retain attribution credit and others do not.  That sounds like excellent 
freedom of choice to me.

> There also seems to be another problem with the current attribution terms:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01193.html

Evan Prodromou, the author of that message, has been an active and regular 
contributor to this list.  He's been keeping this list appraised of 
significant issues from the debian-legal list and been doing a lot to keep 
Creative Commons informed of these concerns.  But thanks for pointing it 
out again--the best way that CC can learn about people's issues with the 
licenses is for someone to speak up.

James