Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mia Garlick <mia AT creativecommons.org>]

So a new license draft has been posted here: 
http://creativecommons.org/drafts/by_2.5.pdf

As you can see, the changes relate to attribution and the plan is that 
they take effect across all of our core licenses. The new version will 
be 2.5 because it is a minor change.  We are in the process of working 
through other revisions to the licenses that will form the basis for 
version 3.0 but this change is needed now to take account of the 
demands of wikis & the open access journal community.

The main changes are to clause 4(b) (citing to the Attribution license, 
which is the license that forms the basis of the sample draft) and the 
reasons for these are twofold:

	(1) To take account of the needs of people who create wikis and thus 
allow attribution to the wiki rather than the author or to the wiki and 
one or more 	authors as they prefer

	(2) To take account of the open access journal requirements, namely, 
that academics and others can secure attribution to themselves and 
their university or 	sponsoring institute and/or the journal

The change to clause 4(a) is a clarification that the right removal 
applies to all of the accreditation required in clause 4(b).  With the 
attribution requirement becoming more complex, it is important to 
clarify the attribution to which the right of removal refers to avoid 
confusion.  This also addresses the concerns of some that this right of 
removal was unclear.

Many of you have given comments on the beta wiki license which have 
been very useful.  The difference between this license draft and the 
beta wiki is that attribution in this draft can be to the author and/or 
one or more other parties.  The beta wiki license only permitted 
attribution to the author *or* another party or parties.  Also, we have 
included an additional example in the brackets to make it clear that 
one of the attributed parties may be a journal.

Additional comments on these proposed changes are welcome.

Mia Garlick
General Counsel
543 Howard St., 5th Floor
San Francisco CA 94105-3013
United States
Tel: 415-946-3073
Fax: 415-946-3001
http://creativecommons.org/

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