Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Evan Prodromou said:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 09:18:17AM -0500, Greg London wrote:
> I think there are some other problems. As I noted before, it's not
> clear that the Attribution license element in the Wiki license is
> supposed to be equivalent, for purposes of ShareAlike, with the
> Attribution element in other licenses.
>
> In other words, can I make a derivative of Wiki 0.5 pages be
> a Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 work, and vice versa? What about iCommons
> by-sa licenses?

given a big-wiki with project-only attribution,
and a local-share project with individual attribution,
how should the projects combine, if at all?

I suppose the simple solution would be that
big-wiki content can be put into local-share project
with attribution resulting in all the local
individuals plus the big-wiki project.

"This work by Bob Smith and Big-Wiki"

The problem I have with this is it breaks the Big-Wiki's
natural assumption about ShareAlike, because it's no
longer sharing alike. Bob gets to bolt on his attribution
requirement to downstream content.

If Big-Wiki used GNU-FDL, then Bob could not put an
attribution requirement on his version.

But if Bob can put Big-wiki content in his local-share
project, then Bob is at an advantage over the
individuals who contriute to the Big-Wiki project
with project-only contribution.

It becomes an Incentive-Trap.

(for those unfamiliar, the common example of
an incentive trap is if one individual in a
concert theater were to stand up to give himself
a better view, everyone behind him must stand up
to see. Once everyone does it, then no one is
any better off than when they started, except
the guy in front, and now the individuals behind
him are stuck standing for a couple hours)

The GNU-FDL allows invariant sections, and
project-level attribution might be considered
an invariant section attributing the project,
but not allowing Bob to put the content into
his local-share project to get individual attribution.

This prevents the incentive trap.

Which means to be legally enforcable, the wiki
license would have to require that no version
be made with attribution to anyone else.

It would be like a GNU-FDL front cover text
or something.