Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mia Garlick <mia AT creativecommons.org>]

For those of us dedicated to creating, expanding and enabling a  
commons of creativity and knowledge (expressed in a variety of  
formats), the issue of license interoperability is an important one.  
Already there has been valuable commentary about the interoperability  
between content licensed under different types of Creative Commons  
licenses (http://www.intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC)— 
specifically, those that permit both commercial and noncommercial  
uses and those that restrict use to noncommercial uses only. These  
concerns are valid and important, and we are working to address them  
in our FAQ and general messaging. It is critical that license  
adopters make a sufficiently informed choice about which license  
satisfies their requirements, and that they understand the  
consequences of their license selection _before_ they choose a license.

However there is another— arguably more pressing —interoperability  
issue that arises in the context of content licensed under a Creative  
Commons license and content licensed under other "free" licenses. As  
many of these licenses are now crafted, there is no way for  
creativity to be shared among these licenses, even if the underlying  
freedoms guaranteed by the licenses are the same.

Thus, for example, Wikipedia is licensed under the Free Software  
Foundation’s GFDL. That license essentially enables the same freedoms  
as the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license; but you can’t  
take content from Wikipedia and mix it with BY-SA photos from Flickr  
because the licenses don’t permit interoperability. Even though the  
underlying freedoms are the same, the legal codes make the content  
non-interoperability.

We want to fix this problem. Over the next few months, Creative  
Commons will be announcing a project to facilitate the federation of  
free licenses. Our aim is to make the legal code of those licenses  
interoperable. We will be working with as many representatives from  
the free culture movement as we can to build this federation of free  
licenses. We will appreciate your advice and feedback as we do that.

Today we are launching a discussion as a small first step towards  
that interoperability. This is by no means a solution to the general  
problem. But it is an effort to smooth the differences between two of  
the most important free license families.

Many have talked about dual-licensing as a solution to the  
interoperability problem. That is a good first step, but it raises  
obvious problem that has been eloquently discussed on our cc-licenses  
list (https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2005-May/ 
002265.html) — namely, that whichever license you take content under,  
any derivatives that you make must then stay under that license.

To solve that problem, and to begin this discussion of license  
interoperability, Creative Commons seeks comment on the attached  
proposed amendments to Creative Commons licenses that contain a  
ShareAlike license element. These amendments would enable dual  
licensing of derivatives. By proposing (and hopefully effecting)  
these amendments, Creative Commons hopes to enable interoperability  
between "free" content licenses, encourage dual licensing of open  
content projects and avoid the depletion those projects by barring  
the return of derivatives to that project. Again, this is not a long  
term solution. But while we begin the process of discussion to find  
that long term solution, we believe this will help many important  
free culture projects achieve a limited interoperability immediately.  
We are committed to doing whatever we can to assure that creative  
work licensed freely can move as freely among licenses as the  
principles embedded in those licenses will allow.

Please circulate your comments on this list.

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