Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Peter Brink" <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>]

On Wednesday, August 18, 2004 10:26 AM,
Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, August 18, 2004, at 01:04AM, Greg London
> <email AT greglondon.com> wrote:
>
>> And this gives a community dis-incentive to contribute
>> to a CC-NC work, because BNC has incentive to buy out
>> the author, and teh author then has monetary incentive
>> to leave the community version high and dry.
>
> Yes, and all that derived work then becomes so much free
advertising.
> The original author would need the permission of contributors to
> relicense their contributions, though (which they are free not to
> give)[is this right?].
>

As always (when it comes to copyright/author's right issues) the
answer depends upon where you live. As far as the Swedish Copyright
Act goes (and also IIRC in other EC countries, such as Denmark and
Germany, as well), the original author would need the permission from
all contributors who have made contributions which are works in their
own right, the other contributors could (in theory) be ignored.
Obviously it might be easier said than done to figure out which
contributors have made "significant" contributions and which have not.
So an author would probably end up with having to ask *all*
contributors for permission. If one stretches this line of reasoning a
bit, a group of contributors could create a "fork" which uses a
different license (or no license at all...) *if* their combined
contribution is so significantly different from the original work that
it could be seen as a "free adaptation". This issue is btw addressed
in section 1.a of the German cc license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/legalcode), an
explanation in english can be found at:
http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/de/english-changes

IANAL, TINLA, etc, etc.

/Peter Brink