Development of Creative Commons licenses

[evan AT bad.dynu.ca (Evan Prodromou)]

On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 09:48:03AM -0400, Greg London wrote:

> If Alice writes "To be or not to be" and dual licenses it,
> can't Bob come along and create the derivative
> "to be or not to be, that is the question" and dual license
> it as well?

It depends on the licenses that Alice uses. If she uses the Frobco
NoDualLicensedDerivativeWorks 1.0 and the Zedco
NoDualLicensedDerivativeWorks 1.2 licenses, both of which prohibit
dual-licensed derivative works, I think the answer is "no".

If you can't make a dual-licensed derivative work under the first, and
you can't make a dual-licensed derivative work under the second, you
can't make a dual-licensed derivative work.

There's a school of thought that looks for a loophole in this. Here's
the scenario: Bob makes a derivative work under the terms of first
license. He then independently makes a separate, different derivative
work under the terms of the second license. But, oh! it turns out he's
made them exactly identical, so as a technical expedient he ships them
as the same digital (or physical) object.

Of course, this is poppycock. Even a toddler knows that two things
can't be simultaneously the same and different, identical and yet
discrete. And anyone even remotely interested in copyright knows that
two identical copies by the same author are not different works; they
are the same work. If you don't even bother to make different copies,
well, the whole argument just falls apart.

And, yes, it's conceivable that two different people could
independently create two different works that are exactly identical,
especially for trivially simple works (although it becomes
questionable, the more trivial the works are, whether there is any
copyrightable content to them). But for the same mentally healthy
person to create two different, identical works, independent of him or
herself...? What would that mean? 

I think that the GFDL and the ShareAlike licenses are effectively the
same as Alice's NoDualLicensedDerivativeWorks licenses, and that they
were made that way on purpose.

When I said, "Please read this entire email carefully", I meant it. If
you think you can answer one or more of the 4 questions I posted,
please do so.  But I've spent the last two years listening to people
make the same imprecise hand-waving arguments and ignoring the content
of the licenses they're talking about. I'm just not interested in more
of the same.

~Evan