Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera AT zmsl.com>]

Takemoto wrote:

> I posted before about licences for text. Now I am wondering about the 
> meaning of "share alike," and how alikeness can be redefined. 

The license text defines exactly what "share alike" means. In brief, it 
means that you have to use the *same* license (notice for the pedantic: 
yes, I know that's a simplification).

> But it is not clear to me what the meaning of "share alike" is.
> How "alike" does the sharing have to be? I guess that the the 
> similarity, the "alike-ness" only refers to having the same licence.

Read the license text. See section 4b:

<quote>
  You may distribute, publicly display... a Derivative Work only under
  the terms of this License, a later version of this License with the
  same License Elements as this License, or a Creative Commons iCommons
  license that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g.
  Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Japan)...
</quote>

> I don't think that this is enough, in the world of text, to ensure the 
> sort of postive cohesion achieved by the GNU in the world of 
> software. 
>
> Hence "Attribution Share HERE alike" or "Share HERE alike"
>
> might work. By that I mean that all all derivative works must be
> shared at the site from where they were downloaded.

Your premise is flawed in that the GPL does not have any similar 
requirement.

In addition, this would be a ridiculously restrictive license. What if 
the original location goes down in the future? What if the owner of that 
location does not want to post your derivative work?

> Is there any licence like this? Are there any plans to chance "share 
> alike" in a similar way to that in which "attribution" changed? 

The attribution was not changed in the way you suggested above.


> At first "attribution" only meant the text. Now we must attribute to the
> URL.

Please read the license text. Section 4c:

<quote>
If you distribute, publicly display... any Derivative Works ... You must 
keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide,... (i) the 
name of the Original Author ... to the extent reasonably practicable, 
the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any,...
</quote>

When the attribution license is changed, the others are changed in tandem.

> Similarly, "share alike" means only comprising the same text, but 
> is there any chance it may be extended to mean "at the same URL."

It does not say "at the same URL". It says that the attribution must 
include the URL, if the author asks.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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