Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

So, after doing the plain text versions of the CC licenses, I did some diff's to make sure that I hadn't accidentally added in any errors. That is, I wanted to make sure that the by-2.0 and by-sa-2.0 only differed by the addition of the ShareAlike element and some section-numbering issues.

I was surprised to see that there were various other textual differences. Probably the most interesting was the differences in the warranty disclaimers. Here's the warranty disclaimer in the Attribution 2.0 license:
>     UNLESS OTHERWISE MUTUALLY AGREED TO BY THE PARTIES IN WRITING, LICENSOR OFFERS THE WORK AS-IS AND MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE WORK, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTIBILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NONINFRINGEMENT, OR THE ABSENCE OF LATENT OR OTHER DEFECTS, ACCURACY, OR THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE OF ERRORS, WHETHER OR NOT DISCOVERABLE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES, SO SUCH EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.
In the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0, the language is subtly different:
>     UNLESS OTHERWISE AGREED TO BY THE PARTIES IN WRITING, LICENSOR OFFERS THE WORK AS-IS AND MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE MATERIALS, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTIBILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NONINFRINGEMENT, OR THE ABSENCE OF LATENT OR OTHER DEFECTS, ACCURACY, OR THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE OF ERRORS, WHETHER OR NOT DISCOVERABLE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES, SO SUCH EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.
Note: "OTHERWISE MUTUALLY AGREED TO BY" vs. "OTHERWISE AGREED TO BY", "CONCERNING THE WORK" vs. "CONCERNING THE MATERIALS".

The disclaimer of warranty in the Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0, and Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 are all identical to the Attribution 2.0. The Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 has another minor variation:
>     UNLESS OTHERWISE MUTUALLY AGREED BY THE PARTIES IN WRITING, LICENSOR OFFERS THE WORK AS-IS AND MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE WORK, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTIBILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NONINFRINGEMENT, OR THE ABSENCE OF LATENT OR OTHER DEFECTS, ACCURACY, OR THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE OF ERRORS, WHETHER OR NOT DISCOVERABLE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES, SO SUCH EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.
Note "MUTUALLY AGREED BY" vs. "MUTUALLY AGREED TO BY".

Anyways, unless there's some good reason for it, these should probably be made equal in some future version of the licenses.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan AT bad.dynu.ca

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