Development of Creative Commons licenses

[wiki_tomos <wiki_tomos AT inter7.jp>]

I have been thinking about the proposed CC- GFDL compatibility. 

My basic opinion is that it is good but worrisome as I posted to 
this list before. Besides, I think there are a number of very 
practical questions that one has to answer when exercising the 
proposed option. The questions have to do with license restrictions 
of the GFDL, and their relations to a typical CC-BY-SA'd work. 
The first time I saw the suggested license change, I thought it 
was very insufficient because it addressed none of these obvious 
questions. I am wondering if this is too technical of an issue 
for this list, and if I should just send this to Mia rather than 
to the list. I still don't know even at the moment I am sending it. 
Sorry if this is inappropriate! 

A typical CC-BY-SA'd work, after some generations of modifications 
from the original work, contains the following elements that are 
related to the license. 

1) a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for the CC-BY-SA 
license. (from 4.b.)

2) notices that refer to the license (from 4.b.)

3) notices referring to the disclaimer of warranties (from 4.b.)

4) copyright notices from all the past generations of the work (from 4.c.) 

5) attribution to (i) the name of the previous authors (possibly 
pseudonyms) if supplied, and/or (ii) the name of another party or 
parties that previous authors/licensors designated (e.g. a sponsor 
institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution in Licensor's 
copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means. (from 4.c.) 

6) the title of the work used, if supplied (from 4.c.) 

7) to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource 
Identifiers, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with 
the Work that refer to the copyright notice or licensing information 
for the previous works (from 4.c.) 

8) a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work 
(e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or 
"Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). (from 4.c.) 

Now, if Alice modifies a work of Bob according to the CC-BY-SA, and 
wants to release it under GFDL, I suppose Alice has to "keep intact" 
or "provide" all the above elements, and somehow create a work that is 
usable as a GFDL'd work. How exactly should she do that? Is it enough 
simply to follow the CC-BY-SA's restrictions? I don't think so. If 
a work released under GFDL does not meet the standard format of 
license notice, copyright notice, and other informtion required by 
GFDL, it would look like a work created without properly following GFDL. 

I will go item by item of the list above, and explore how Alice 
should meet the CC's restrictions while at the same time make a 
properly GFDL'd work. 

1) a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for the CC-BY-SA license. 
(from 4.b.)

This is already a bit of trouble. GFDL'd work must contain the full 
text of the GFDL, and not its URI, not CC-BY-SA's text/URI. 

So for people like Alice, CC-BY-SA should say something like "if You 
will license the Derivative Work under GFDL, you do not have to do 
this, but instead you have to include the full text of the GFDL." 

2) notices that refer to the license (from 4.b.)

This is troublesome, too, I think. When Alice releases the 
derivative work she created from Bob's CC-BY-SA'd work, Alice 
should include a license notice referring only to GFDL, so that 
the downstream users will not think that the work is part 
governed by CC-BY-SA and part governed by GFDL, ending up 
with very restrictive and hard to reuse. 

GFDL's license notice requirements are as follows:

4.F "Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a 
license notice giving the public permission to use the Modified 
Version under the terms of this License, in the form shown in 
the Addendum below."

Addendum's example is as follows:
"Copyright (c)  YEAR  YOUR NAME.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
"

So perhaps Alice should follow this specific format of placing 
license notices into her work, as opposed to simply keeping 
intact all the license notices. If she does not do that, it 
would cause a trouble for potential users of her work. Such 
users find Alice's work not carrying the proper license 
notice that GFDL work should carry. CC-BY-SA may require that 
people who want to release a derivative under GFDL to follow 
GFDL's license notice requirement. 


3) notices referring to the disclaimer of warranties (from 4.b.)

GFDL says 4 O. "Preserve any Warranty Disclaimers." So this 
part is probably the same. 

4) copyright notices from all the past generations of 
the work (from 4.c.) 

GFDL says the following:
4 D. "Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document."

So it seems to be okay to simply follow CC-BY-SA.

5) attribution to (i) the name of the previous authors 
(possibly pseudonyms) if supplied, and/or (ii) the name 
of another party or parties that previous authors/licensors 
designated (e.g. a sponsor institute, publishing entity, 
journal) for attribution in Licensor's copyright notice, 
terms of service or by other reasonable means. (from 4.c.) 

This is a complicated part. GFDL has a requirement regarding 
History section. 

4. I. "Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve 
its Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, 
year, new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as 
given on the Title Page. If there is no section Entitled "History" 
in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and 
publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then 
add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the 
previous sentence."

Title Page referred to in this part is defined as follows: 

1. "The "Title Page" means, for a printed book, the title 
page itself, plus such following pages as are needed to hold, 
legibly, the material this License requires to appear in the 
title page. For works in formats which do not have any title 
page as such, "Title Page" means the text near the most prominent 
appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of 
the body of the text. "

And GFDL's requirement related to the Title Page and attribution is : 

4 B. "List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more 
persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications 
in the Modified Version, together with at least five of 
the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal 
authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you 
from this requirement."

I think Alice should place attribution in this "History" 
section, by creating one, as well as on a "Title Page." Now 
there are some very obvious problems with GFDL's requirement. 
How can she determine who are "principal" authors and who are 
not? What happens when Alice's determination is contestable? But 
that's an issue generic to GFDL, not CC-BY-SA to GFDL transition. 
So I will not think about it now. 


6) the title of the previous work if supplied (from 4.c.) 

GFDL has a requirement related to the title of the work used 
to create the derivative. That's 4 I quoted above. I quote again

4 I. "Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its 
Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, 
new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on 
the Title Page. If there is no section Entitled "History" in the 
Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and 
publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then 
add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the 
previous sentence."

Alice should create a History section and place the title of the 
Bob's work there. It is, however, still a bit problematic. 

GFDL, because of this History requirement, makes a work to carry 
titles of all the previous works from which the current work is 
derived. If Bob created his work deriving a CC-BY-SA'd work of 
Cole, and Cole deriving from Doug's, then titles of their works 
should be included in the History section. 

In comparison, CC-BY-SA does not seem to require such preservation 
of Titles. It is required to preserve the title of the licensed 
Work, but not that of 2 or 3 generations ago. As a result, it 
would create an incomplete History section. It means a 
downstream user might misunderstand that the Alice's GFDL'd work 
is created without properly following the GFDL. Such work, the 
potential use might think, is too risky to reuse. 

Perhaps there should be some statement like "this work is 
created from a work CC-BY-SA, and therefore some of the titles of 
the past versions of the Work are missing." 

7) to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource 
Identifiers, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated 
with the Work that refer to the copyright notice or licensing 
information for the previous works (from 4.c.) 

GFDL has a URI preservation requirement, but it is slightly 
different. GFDL's requirement has to do with a URI where 
people can find Bob's Work. It is 
4 J. 

"Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document 
for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and 
likewise the network locations given in the Document for 
previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in the 
"History" section. You may omit a network location for a work 
that was published at least four years before the Document 
itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers 
to gives permission."

So if Alice follows CC-BY-SA's restriction, and provide a URI 
where the Work's license information and other information 
is provided, but not a copy of Bob's Work, then it would look 
inappropriate as a GFDL'd work. Perhaps Alice should be 
exempted from this restriction when she releases the derivative 
work under GFDL. 

8) a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative 
Work (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," 
or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). (from 4.c.) 

This is a type of information I think is the most comfortable 
in History section. CC-BY-SA says that " Such credit may be 
implemented in any reasonable manner," but GFDL requires 
certain format, regardless of if it is reasonable or not. But 
while CC-BY-SA does not require these credits be kept intact 
in all the future derivative works, GFDL's History section is 
designed to be inherited forever. So I am not sure what is 
the best solution here. 


That's all for now. I am not confident if I was clear enough 
on individual point. But the basic point I wanted to make was 
that the change proposed currently does not seem to address 
these issues, and one may quite possibly be overwhelmed by 
amount of questions to solve, or carry these elements of Work 
into GFDL'd derivative in an inappropriate format so that the 
GFDL'd work would look like not safely usable. 

And that is not all. GFDL require certain information (such 
as year each of past modification happened, name of the 
publisher if one exists, etc.) that CC-BY-SA does not deal 
with. When Alice releases her work under GFDL, perhaps she 
should include some of these pieces of information. 

Change in CC license, in order to effectively establish a 
compatibility, should include answers to some of these 
problems - others could be left to the licensee, yet others 
could be dealt with FAQs.

And finally, let me say again that I am not a lawyer, and 
all the discussions here could be very sloppy and wrong. 


Regards, 


Tomos