Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Todd A. Jacobs" <nospam AT codegnome.org>]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 10:35:10AM -0500, Greg London wrote:

> You cannot license a derivative with fewer restrictions than the
> original author gave out in the original license, because you don't
> ahve those rights to give out.

That's not entirely true. If you license something BY-NC, and I create a
derivative, I can certainly license my derivative as BY, BY-NC, BY-ND,
or even BY-NC-SA. I could also use the derivative commercially, since it
is *not* the non-commercial original work, but an allowable derivative
under the license.

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but my understanding is that *I* would own
all rights not held by the original author in any properly-licensed
derivative, and could therefore submit *my* derivative into the public
domain--just not the parent work. It probably wouldn't be a good idea to
do so, and I think a court would have a field day parsing both works to
determine if they were sufficiently differentiated so as to avoid
submitting substantial amounts of the original in violation of the
license, but I'm reasonably confident that the *theory*, if not the
practice, is allowable under a non-SA license.

So, yes: you *can* license downstream works under both more-open as well
as more-restrictive licenses, unless ShareAlike has been designated.
That's why I think judicious use of SA is critical to the widespread
acceptance of CC licenses.

-- 
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