Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

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