Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Steven Ericsson-Zenith" <steven AT semeiosis.com>]

Mike Linksvayer wrote ..
> Steven Ericsson-Zenith wrote:
> > I am about to release an XML schema associated with one of my projects
> and felt 
> > that copyright was the right claim and not an open source license.
> 
> Open source licenses rely on copyright, as do Creative Commons licenses.

An open source license also licenses the use of intellectual property - not 
only 
the copyright of the source. Copyright pertains only to the substantive 
document 
it is applied to - not the intellectaul property within. Or am I mistaken ?

> 
> > I want to make the schema publicly available and encourage others to
> freely use 
> > it and generate it but I'd like to maintain some benevolent dictatorship
> :-) 
> > over derivative works.
> [...]
> >     1. The XML schema itself.
> >     2. The content in generated instances of the metadata.
> 
> I'm not familiar with existing practices for licensing schemas. 
> Presumably you hold copyright in the schema and you can license it 
> however you wish.

I've concluded that a Creative Commons license with a restriction on 
derivatives
will likely do the job for the schema.

> 
> I'm not sure from the above whether you want to assert that instance 
> documents are derivatives of the schema.  I'm not sure such an assertion
>   would hold up in any case.

There are two issues in the case I have in mind: the instance documents and 
the document metadata within them. The schema itself carries a requirement 
that a copyright statement be provided that discloses the copyright of the 
source 
document. 

The question is then, what can one say about the copyright of the instance 
document - most of us, I think, will assume that it is it the copyright of 
the 
service that generated the instance. As an author I might prefer that the 
copyright belong to me - or a service might wish to assert such to be the 
case.

It follows also that use of the terms and form of the XML structure is a use 
of 
some copyright.  I'd just like to see that clarified in a license.

With respect,
Steven