Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

MMP said:
> 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.

Rights of the contributers are automatically protected
with standard copyright.

To do that, you could have people contribute to the
project, have them retain all the rights, and allow
them at a later date to take down anything they
contributed.

The problem with this is that if you "end up with
something of interest", you then have to get everyone's
permission to re-distribute their contributions outside
the original website, get their permission to modify
their work, and get their permission to sell the work
for a bit of money to pay for hosting.  And then if
anyone decides they don't like what you're doing,
don't like the final product, or don't like who you
sold it to, then they could demand that you take their
contributions out of the work.

That is protecting the rights of the CONTRIBUTERS.
The problem is that it sacrifices the project.

If you want to protect the PROJECT, then you might want to
consider CC-ShareAlike, which is a Copyleft-style license.

You could do this by telling users that by contributing
to the project, they agree to contribute the work under
the CC-ShareAlike license.

Then if you "end up with something of interest",
the project as a whole is licensed in such a way
that it can survive on its own. no one needs anyone's
permission to do anythign with the work. And no contributer
can revoke their contribution just because they don't
like what you did with it.

CC-ShareAlike would protect the project
and allow it the chance to thrive.

Just as a side note: you'll want to make a point to
design your project from the beginning to make it easy
for you to keep track of everyone's attribution information.
If you use standard CC-SA, the individual bits of the project
will require attribution of the author who contributed it.
And you'll want to handle that up front and keep track of
it somehow so you can honor the licenses.

The alternative is to tell users that by contributing
to the project, they license their work CC-SA and that
they waive any attribution requirements.

The alternative to CC-SA but still protect the project
is to have people contribute to the project under a
more Public Domain style license, such as Attribution-Only,
or CC-PD. This will allow proprietary forks that could
actually compete against the project. And depending on
the duration of the project that may or may not be a good idea.

http://www.greglondon.com/dtgd/html/draftingthegiftdomain.html#8_3_Copyleft_and_Public_Domain_versus_Competition

If you aren't concerned with proprietary competition
and you aren't concerned about the project splintering
then CC-Attribution or CC-PublicDomain would work as well.

It all comes down to whether you want to protect the
rights of the contributers or protect the project itself.

Hope that helps,

Greg

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