Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gottfried Hofmann <toddd AT mypse.goracer.de>]

> I wrote that summary, and no, we don't say that. You should probably
> actually read it:
>
>         http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary
>
> There are some unclear parts of the Attribution license element that
> need to be made more succinct, but attribution itself is not considered
> an unreasonable restriction on distribution or making modified versions.

What do you mean by "excessive authorship credits"?


>A name, a title, (possibly) a copyright notice and (possibly) a license
>URL? Why is that lavish and laborious?

Well, when you have just one or two authors/coauthers it's not a lot of 
work. But when it comes to game development, the number of files can go 
up to thousands, and if you take from several sources it can be a lot of 
co-authors you have to mention.
The obnoxious thing about BSD wasn't the fact that you had to put one 
sentence into your ad - the problem was that soon you had to put several 
such sentences into your ad because everyone who licensed his word BSD 
wanted to be in the ad.
Same thing for CC-BY even though it's not about ads but about credit in 
general. Once the credits pile up it starts being obnoxious.
I'm working on a little game project that actually tries to keep exact 
track of all authors and copyright information - well I'm glad that I'm 
not the guy who is doing that job :-)


There is a pretty nice system of attribution in the gaming community, I 
don't know wether it's compatible with CC-BY:

Let's assume that there is a game called "Evilwars" or something. It 
consists of a team of artists and developers. The credits on the website 
 would read something like this:

Adrian - Project Leader / model designer
Jeff - Engine Programmer
Bill - Programmer
Fred - Models/Skins
Carl - Skins
Wolfgang - Textures
Heinricht - Textures
Herman - Sound FX

Contributors: Sven, Jack, John, Arnold, Mike

Let's assume there is another gaming project that likes to use some of 
the textures from "Evilwars". It would give credit in a way similiar to 
this:

"Some textures taken from Evilwars"



Does this sort of Attribution work with CC-BY?



>I don't know of a license that has fewer requirements than Attribution.
>The only no-strings-attached provision is a Public Domain dedication.

Well, except for the source requirement the GPL has fewer requirements. 
A lot of game devs license their entire game GPL and not just the engine.

But unfortunately there are only little art/content licenses that don't 
require attribution.

Why is attribution required by free content licenses but not by free 
software licenses?


-Toddd