Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Evan Prodromou said:
> 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
> 0.5license, 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 read it as they are compatible and interchange is allowed.
I was talking about whether it SHOULD be that way or not
when I went on a ramble about big-wiki meets little-sharealike
or whatever it was.

I suppose it's probably the most workable solution in terms
of taking big-wiki stuff and putting it in someone's little
sharaliek project. This means that there isn't a barrier
between all the current sharealike stuff and a wiki licensed
work.

The problem is that if a wiki has project-only attribution,
it'll have to mix and match any sharealike attribution from
external sources.

"this wiki by 'BigWiki' and 'Alice' and 'Bob' and ..."

Which means for a wiki to attempt project-level attribution,
it'll have to do some work to find people willing to
do contributions without giving attribution to the individuals.

It also means that the BigWiki project managers will have
to deal with Charlie possibly becoming upset because
he didn't get individual attribution when Alice and Bob
did. Worst case, all the project-level contributers
will suddenly demand individual attribution, at which
point I mentioned that teh game theory name for this is
an "Incentive trap" (one person stands up in a theater,
everyone has to stand up)

I think it makes project-level attribution more difficult,
but I suppose in the end it comes down to project-level
decisions. If a project is willing to pull in external
stuff and add an extra attribution thingy, then that's
their choice. They'll just have to be extra vigiliant to
prevent it from turning into an incentive trap.

The alternative is that a bigwiki project can take an
attribution-sharealike work by "Alice", roll it into
the BigWiki, change attribution to BigWiki, and remove
Alice's attribution.  Which then becomes an incentive
for everyone to use the Wiki license so they can drop
everyone else's attribution information.
No. Never mind that. bad idea.

So, the wiki license doesn't really do anything except
codify the idea of re-assigning attribution by contributers
who agree to do so. You can mix and match sharealike and
wiki works, and you simply accumulate attributions as
you go along.

In the end, it doesn't make the attribution situation
any WORSE. It improves it slightly by getting people
to think about attribution overhead and whether they
want to do that or do a project-level attribution.
And then it leaves the choices to the users.

Probably can't make the situation for attribution
any better unless you're willing to make the two
licenses incompatible, and that's a big loss for a
little win. probably not worth it. It'll have to
come down to the project managers of a big wiki
enforcing the idea that they'll only accept
contributions that have project-level attribuiton.