Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan.prodromou AT gmail.com>]

On Mar 28, 2005 6:02 PM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> wrote:

Evan Prodromou said:
> Yeah, but it explicitly calls out iCommons licenses separately.

OK, I give up. I just did a side-by-side comparison of
wiki 0.5 and sharealike-attribution-2.0 and
the sections are identical.

They both call out iCommons licenses.

So, I still don't know where the mismatch is.

Yes, they're absolutely identical. Here's the issue that I'm trying to
bring up, in a nutshell: derivative works of stuff available under
ShareAlike licenses have to be available under a license with the exact
same License Elements. The other license can be later versions of the
"core" licenses, or iCommons licenses, or whatever, but they have to
have the same License Elements.

So you can make a derivative of a work licensed under
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0, and that derivative can be
licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 5.7, or
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike iCommons Russia 8.9b. They just
have to be Creative Commons (TM) licenses, and they have to have by,
nc, and sa as the set of elements.

The problem is that Wiki 0.5 and Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 both have
license elements Attribution and ShareAlike. Unlike the previous
examples, though, they don't differ in version or language or intended
legal regime; they just differ in the details of Attribution. This
makes their relationship kind of unique.

As far as I can tell, they are mutually compatible: you can take
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 works and make derivatives under the Wiki
0.5 license, and vice versa. My questions are:

• Is this correct, or have I missed something?
  
• Is this the desired behaviour?
• If this isn't the desired behaviour, how does one fix it? Could Wiki 0.5's attribution element be renamed "WikiAttribution" or something?

I'm sorry if I'm making a mountain out of a molehill.

~Evan