Development of Creative Commons licenses

[evan AT wikitravel.org]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 07:25:52PM +0100, Rob Myers wrote:

> >I think you're really, really misunderstanding the Attribution clause.
> >Conflating it with the BSD advertising clause is really, really 
> >inaccurate.
> >It has nothing to do with advertising, and the requirements are 
> >nowhere near
> >as obnoxious, nor are there the problems of scale that come from the
> >advertizing clause.
> 
> They differ in degree, but both require additional "payment" from the 
> user in the form of sticking a name on a product.

I think there's a really qualitative difference. If you bought a magazine ad
for a product based on a 3-clause BSD licensed work, you had to put the
notice in the ad. You don't have to do that with Attribution licenses.

It may be worthwhile to compare the attribution requirements in the
Creative Commons licenses to some other licenses:

                   CC by-*    GPL        2-clause BSD
----------------------------------------------------------------
copyright notice     X         X             X
license notice       X         X             X
changelog            X         X
no warranty notice             X             X
author name(s)       X
title                X
"linkback" URI       X

I guess I have a hard time seeing what's so obnoxious about these few extra
items. Don't get me wrong: I think there are some problems with Attribution.
The draft summary of the CC licenses developed for debian-legal is a good
place to see some.
      
      http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary
      
But I think Attribution compares _extremely_ favorably to, say, Front Cover
and Back Cover Text requirements in the GFDL.

~ESP