Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

On Thu, 2004-28-10 at 15:41 -0400, Greg London wrote:
> I think attribution should be viewed by its original name of "advertising
> clause". If you're using CC-BY for something, it should be for free
> advertising, not for any sort of gift-economy type project.

That's a complete and utter crock. The Attribution license element was never called the "advertising clause". People have compared it to the so-called "obnoxious BSD advertising clause", although it has nothing whatsoever to do with that clause. I'm getting really sick of hearing otherwise intelligent people equate the two, since they have nothing even remotely in common.

Here is the BSD advertising clause:
>     3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
>      This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
Here is the Attribution license element:
>     If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works, You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Derivative Work or Collective Work, at a minimum such credit will appear where any other comparable authorship credit appears and in a manner at least as prominent as such other comparable authorship credit.
Anyone with a lick of sense can see the difference. If you need some hints, try this:

1. The first one has to do with advertising, separate from the distribution of the work.
2. The second one doesn't.

Attribution has much more in common with "keep copyright notices intact" phrasing in licenses than the advertising clause. A more apt comparison would be with clauses 1 and 2a of the GNU General Public License.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan AT bad.dynu.ca                OOO