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cc-licenses - Re: Why do you have to chose the "Attribution" option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?

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  • From: James Grimmelmann <james.grimmelmann AT yale.edu>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: Why do you have to chose the "Attribution" option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?
  • Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 19:42:35 -0700

At 01:52 PM 8/15/2004, toddd AT mypse.goracer.de wrote:
>
> 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?

There are also, exactly as you suggest, advantages to having many different licenses. Picking the actual number and set to offer is a balancing act. The extremely strong public preference for licenses with attribution was an indication that the balance between flexibility and simplicity might be better served by standardizing on attribution and letting the main variation among licenses be on the sorts of uses people could make, rather than on the required credit.

Or is it that all the waiving makes things more complicated?

That's definitely the case: at some point, if you simplify too much, people's desires for more nuanced terms lead them to start trying to evade the license standardizations, which leads you back towards the licensing complexity that CC is trying to help fix.

But the Attribution requirement isn't a bad one for people to waive, if they have to. The Attribution language explicitly contemplates cases of waiver (with the "if supplied" clause). Waiving something like NoDerivatives would be much messier. I'm a law student, and I wouldn't trust myself to write language that would waive that requirement without a serious risk of messing up. Having authors waive Attribution when they post their works with a CC license is more practical than having them waive the other requirements.

> 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.

But it won't be required. The only circumstances under which attribution is forbidden is when the licensor exercises their right to disavow attribution on derivative or collective works of which they disapprove. That's an entirely separate process, and one that requires positive notification and reference to a specific work from which the author's name should be stripped.

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...

Just to be pedantic, the requirements of the license are distinct from the rules of copyright law. If I say that I wrote Macbeth, copyright law doesn't directly forbid it (of course, I couldn't copyright Macbeth myself). Nor is there any license involved that I might be violating. If I take your CC-BY-licensed work and say that I wrote it, then I'm violating the license: specifically, I'm failing to give you the required attribution.

The point is that any requirement to give credit (or to refrain from claiming authorship) comes entirely from the license's terms.

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"?

Under my option #2 ("my name or no name at all"), I think a notice by the modifier saying "these portions made by me," where the portions are identified, would suffice. If that's too complex, then, as a practical matter, it's also fine for them to say, "Created by someone, modified by me" and point to the linkback URL (if you supplied one) to identify what parts were in the original. Or, they could say "Created by Toddd, modified by me," (with the linkback, if you supplied it) since you allowed them to use your name as the author (in addition to the option of not using your name).


I think I left the disclaimer off my first email, so let me emphasize that I am not a lawyer and I do not speak for Creative Commons.

James




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