Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 13 Mar 2005, at 10:32, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>
> > It seems to me the localized versions of BY-SA are all incompatible in
> > the sense that you cannot combine a work under eg. the Finnish BY-SA
> > license and a work under the Dutch BY-SA license.

The whole point of the international licenses is that they are 
compatible. :-) You can mix iCommons work, the licenses contain the 
following bit of language to allow this (4b in BY-SA):

"You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly 
digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this 
License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements 
as this License, or a Creative Commons iCommons license that contains 
the same License Elements as this License (e.g. Attribution-ShareAlike 
2.0 Japan). "

> One second... are you sure there is such a thing as localized versions 
> of CC
> licenses? I'm looking for them and I can't find them. Instead, what I 
> can find is
> localized versions of the Commons Deed. But that's not the license. It 
> is merely a
> human-readable summary of the license.

There are localised versions of the legal codes, e.g.:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/br/legalcode

> If you go to other languages, and click on the legal code link, you 
> always arrive
> at the same license (in English).

I don't encounter that.

> > It seems to me that works licensed under SA 1.0 or BY-SA 1.0 are
> > incompatible with works licensed under BY-SA 2.0. Is it so?
>
> I'm interested to know the answer to this question also. One of the 
> virtues that
> I've seen in CC is the ability to mix.

1.0 and 2.0 are incompatible. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be 
done about this apart from contacting people and asking them to 
upgrade. I've hit this a couple of times myself.

> > What happens to the works licensed under the 2.0 licenses if/when CC
> > releases new revisions of licenses?
>
> I'm just starting a project using the BY license. Our copyright notice 
> says:
>
>    You can distribute it and/or modify it under the terms of ... the
>    Creative Commons Attribution License, version 2.0 or later
>    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

The licenses handle upgrading. See clause 4b again:

"You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly 
digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this 
License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements 
as this License, [...]"

So the licenses do work as one would expect them to for working with 
new and internationalised licenses.

- Rob.