Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Evan Prodromou said:
> On Sun, 2005-03-27 at 07:33 -0500, Greg London wrote:
>
>> Does that make wikipedia the queen bee
>> since it has no attribution requirement?
>
> Maybe we're delving too deep into the moral aspect of this license, and
> we should concentrate on the mechanics.
>
> I'll try to keep my personal opinions on the propriety of this license
> in other fora.

whatever.


Here's the portion of the legal text that has the attribution requirement:

<paste>
You must ... give credit, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing,
either (i) to the Original Author, or (ii) if the Licensor designates another
party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institution or publishing entity) for
attribution in Licensor's copyright notice or terms of service or by other
reasonable means, then to such party or parties.
</paste>

Hm, exactly how does a project MANDATE that it will only accept
contributions that use option (ii)?

Most wikis and forums and what not have a user agreement that says
"By submitting works, you agree to submit them under the CC-Wiki
license" (or whatever license the project picks)

If the project says "You agree to submit works under the CC-Wiki
license", couldn't a contributer say "yea, and I pick option (i)
so you have to attribute me individually"

I'm just wondering if a user agreement could be worded to
enforce option (ii) only.

I assume if a project wants to take on individual attribution
that they won't mind if someone wants to contribute anonymously
and give attribution to the project. So I can't see a need to
really enforce option (i) only.

But a project that wants project level attribuiton only
will need some way to enforce that up front so that
contributers don't claim a year after they contributed
that they thought they were going to get individual attribution.


Would this be legally defendable?

"You agree to license all your contributions under the
cc-wiki license with Attribution designated to <project>"

If so, then I see no problem with cc-wiki and attribution.
(other than there's no way to turn it off)

Greg