Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Thu, 2005-09-06 at 23:56 -0700, James Byers wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I help run http://wikispaces.org, a free wiki host whose 
> member-contributed content is currently licensed under by-sa 2.0.  I'm 
> hoping someone can help clarify the process of moving to by-sa 2.5 for 
> existing and future content. 

I'm not confident about this, BUT... I don't think it's possible to
re-license _existing_ content without the consent of its copyright
holders. The "any later version" part of the ShareAlike section is just
for _derivative_ works.

Section 4a of the license says:

        You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or
        publicly digitally perform the Work only under the terms of this
        License, [...]
        
While section 4b says:

        You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or
        publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the
        terms of this License, a later version of this License with the
        same License Elements as this License [...]

Of course, if your organization is the copyright holder, you can release
under whatever license you want.

And if you've set up some other agreement with the contributors which
allows you to change the license, well, that's coolio, too.

But if the whole of your agreement with contributors is the by-sa 2.0, I
don't _think_ you can relicense at will.

> Is it correct and appropriate to simply update these to version 2.5 or 
> should existing content keep the 2.0 versions?  What other issues should 
> we consider so that we're not adversely affecting the rights of our 
> member-authors in the process?

My suggestion is to flag existing works as "by-sa 2.0" in your DB. When
a page is edited, a derivative work has been made, and it can be
re-licensed under the 2.5 licenses. Of course, this should be part of
your "By clicking 'save', you agree..." text.

Yes, I realize this is kind of a pain, but I believe it's the way the
license works.

~Evan