Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> Greg London wrote:
>> If Alice and Bob both hold copyright on some work
>> (the wrote a novel together, for example),
>> then any derivative of that novel must get
>> Alice and Bob's permission. Both.
>
> No. Alice can modify the book without Bob's permission. Bob can modify
> the book without Alice's permission.
>
> I see this happen every day at OpenOffice.org. Non-Sun contributors
> agree to a "Joint Copyright" with Sun, which means that they both have
> copyright ownership over this person's contribution. Sun then proceeds
> to re-license it under whatever propietary license they like and put it
> in StarOffice.

Isn't that the same as Alice (Non-sun contributers) getting
Bob's permission (Sun's relicense)?

My interpretation of "All of humanity" was similar to the
way that something like GPL makes all derivatives to be
the result of all prior authors. Therefore all contributers
are authors. I may have misunderstood what the "all of humanity"
copyright means, but then I'm only guessing at the intention.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong in saying that
a CC-SA work that has had 10 different contributers must
get all 10 contributer's permission to change the license.

I believe that is the reason behind license "inertia"
and is what makes it so bloody difficult to change a
license once a project has acquired a number of contributers.

i.e. once you get a work like Linux licensed GNU-GPL,
the only way Microsoft could make a proprietary version
would be to get every contributer's permission to license
it that way.

Is this inaccurate?

Greg

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Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws
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