Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 08:47 +0000, MMP wrote:
> The project will consist of a multimedia work of fiction, created through  
> the medium of a Wiki.
>
> Although we don't expect the final product (if there can ever be such a  
> thing) to be commercially viable, we would nevertheless wish to protect  
> the rights of contributors in the event that we do end up with something  
> of interest.
What rights do you want to protect? Freedom of religion? Right of habeus corpus?

If you're talking about making money, get over it. Commercial publication of CC-licensed works has been pretty sparse, except for the occasions where book authors get their publishers to allow an already published work to be distributed under a CC license. I don't think there's a single case of it working the other way around (but examples may be there).

For a wiki: more so. It would be practicably impossible for a publisher to contact each and every one of your hundreds of contributors to get a contract for commercial use. It's infeasible. It's never going to happen.

If you're talking about making sure that their contributions, given freely, stay free, you should look at the Attribution-ShareAlike license. If you're worried about them getting credit for their work, look at the Attribution license.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan AT bad.dynu.ca