Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 09:33 -0700, Mia Garlick wrote:

> (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

So, here's a use case: there's a wiki to create documentation for a new
piece of software, Foo. The developers and users decide to use this form
of abbreviated attribution for the wiki's content, to "Foo Documentation
Wiki". To keep downstream distributors' requirements small, they also
make a point of leaving out copyright notifications. After all, what's
the point of collective attribution if there's still a bunch of
copyright notices to carry around?

Fast forward 25 years. Of course, the Foo Documentation Wiki, which was
never a legally constituted entity and never held any copyright on any
of the works, is long, long gone. Its Web logs and history files have
disappeared into the bit buckets of eternity.

But people will still want to publish and archive the work. What will
give them that right? A notification from this not-even-fictitious
person, the Foo Documentation Wiki? Who is the licensor? Who knows? 

Also, when does the work finally fall out of copyright? Again, who
knows? For the USA, and I believe some other countries, copyright
extends for the lifetime of the author. But who's the author? The only
name on the work is for some made-up thing that has no legal standing.

I think that enabling unlabelled, unattributed or misattributed works is
a disservice to posterity. Lawrence Lessig's book, "Free Culture",
outlines very nicely how hard it is to determine the rights to a work
more than a decade old. Perhaps we shouldn't make it harder.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan AT bad.dynu.ca