Development of Creative Commons licenses

[toddd AT mypse.goracer.de]

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

I did not find good arguments against making attribution standart in those 
mails...


> >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.

I want to supply authorship information. I just don't care wether ppl give me
attribution or not.

> 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.  

So why do you have so many licenses at all? 
by-nc-nd and by-nc-sa would be enough. People could just waive whatever they
don't want. Just 2 licenses, doesn't that sound good?
Or is it that all the waiving makes things more complicated?

> 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. 

Might not does not mean mustn't. So they can still give attribution.

> 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.

See above. In your argumentation, 2 CC licenses would be enough.


> 
> >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.

If I had chosen by-nd, they could not even create a derived work, so my choice
gives them more freedom at least. And they can still add their authorship
information, it's just that they can't be sure it won't be stripped. 
But hey, nobody can claim authorship of something he did not create. Nobody 
can
claim full authorship on the file. They can only say that they modified it. So
the only bad thing that might happen is that the file ends up with no credits 
at
all, but it's still sa...

BTW: How would waiving attribution work? Lets's say: I license a sound file
by-sa and waive attribution. Someone makes a modification and choses not to
mention me for some reason but wants attribution for his part of the work. 
What
does he mention then? "Created by someone, modified by me"? "Created by
anonymous, modified by me"?, "Created by John Doe, modified by me"?

> 
> 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.

See above :-)

-Toddd