Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

At 10:50 AM 8/16/2004, toddd AT mypse.goracer.de wrote:

> > 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.
>
> But why do you want to sacrife the wishes of 3% of the artists who did not 
> chose
> attribution?

As I have explained already, the wishes of those artists have not been 
sacrificed; they are still able to use a Creative Commons license while not 
requiring full attribution from licensees.  All that the lack of 
non-Attribution licenses means is that licensees cannot forbid people who 
make derivative works from requiring attribution.  I do not believe that this

> The more in complexicity would only apply to 3% of the cases so that 
> should not
> be a problem.

Additional complexity applies to everyone who uses a Creative Commons 
license.  Many people who adopt these licenses have only vague familiarity 
with copyright and may know only what information is provided on the 
"choose license" page.  The simpler that the process of picking a license, 
the easier for these people.  Especially when sites such as Flickr bundle 
CC licenses as an option for anyone using the site, keeping down the 
complexity of the selection process can be very important to CC license 
adoption.

> So if waiving makes it more complex, why not just bring back attribtution 
> as an
> option?

Yes, having the choice of what author information to supply is more complex 
than not having such a choice, but it's still not as complex overall as 
having a separate Attribution license would be.

> > 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.
>
> I was talking about the SA 1.0 license. Explicitely not "BY".
> You are still not to claim it your own even if attribution was not 
> required. You
> could only strip my name and that's it. Because otherwise you would violate
> copyright law.

This statement is not true as a matter of American copyright law.  The 
limited moral rights provision -- 17 U.S.C. s. 106A -- applies only to 
visual art (such as paintings).  Otherwise, the right to be identified as 
the author is not among the exclusive rights reserved to authors.  It's an 
infringement to copy the work without permission, whether or not you credit 
the author.  If you don't copy it (or distribute, perform, display, or 
webcast it), then it doesn't matter what you say about who wrote it: 
copyright law isn't involved.  The only place in which attribution becomes 
relevant to copyright law is in seeing whether the terms of a license that 
requires attribution have been followed (because if they haven't, then 
there's a copyright infringement).

Other countries, of course, do have stronger moral rights provisions.  I 
believe that Germany, for example, does protect authors' right of 
attribution.


I am not a lawyer; I do not speak for Creative Commons.

James