Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Sat, 2005-05-28 at 11:35 -0700, Mark Ivey wrote:
> If I have a CC license notice on my work, do I also need the copyright
> notice?  I couldn't anything about this on the CC website.
> 
> The instructions for using the GPL explicitly state that I need the
> copyright notice so I assume I do for CC also.  Is that right?

Let me tell you a little something about Bad Bart, Mark.

OK, just kidding. Side issue there.

The rule in the USA used to be that you _had_ to put a copyright notice
on every work in order to retain copyright on it. This rule kind of
disappeared back in the 70s when the USA joined the Berne Convention and
we got the idea of "natural copyright" -- that is, that you
automatically have a copyright on everything you produce.

However, many if not most people still use the copyright notice format:

        Copyright YEAR, YEAR, YEAR NAME.

...or something along those lines. This is not strictly necessary, but
it _is_ pretty useful; after all, knowing who holds the rights to a
work, and what year(s) the work was made are pretty useful.

For some reason, though, the Creative Commons Web site deprecates the
use of copyright notices in favor of those "This work under a Creative
Commons license" notices. I don't know why, but that's been the style
for quite a long time.

Anyways, to answer your question: no, you don't need to, but it helps.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan AT bad.dynu.ca