Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

On 26 Nov 2005 21:03:49 +0900
wiki_tomos <wiki_tomos AT inter7.jp> wrote:
> For example, she is supposed to create a History section,
> and it  should contain things like names of previous
> authors, years they  are created/modified. What if the
> Alice's work is a fifth generation  derivative, deriving
> from Bob, who derived his work from Cathy's,  who in turn
> derived her work from Doug's, who in turn used Ed's?  How
> likely is it that Alice knows title's of all the previous
> works?  Perhaps not much, given that CC-BY-SA does not
> seem to require  preservation of such information. GFDL
> says Alice should take these  pieces of information from
> "Title Page" or, when title page is absent,  prominent
> place near the title of the work, before the main text of 
> the work. It would be certainly possible for things like
> blog entry  to have no Title Page, nor those pieces of
> information near the  entry's title. 

It's important to realize that the point of a license is to
implement the *intent* of the author (or authors) of a work.
The choice of a standard license is an expression of both
that intent, and the desire to simply life for the next
user by using standard, well-understood forms.

When a license is converted from one standard license to
another, the intent of the original author is not
retro-actively altered!

If the original author released under the By-SA, they
obviously were not concerned about the history information
that you describe here. The fact that the work is converted
to the GFDL does not make the terms apply retro-actively to
works licensed under the By-SA.

Once the transition occurs, the work is a *new* GFDL work,
with a *fresh* history, which may regard the last available
By-SA work as the "original" for the purposes of the
history.

Future users of the work who are relying on the GFDL
licensing will want this information, but must acknowledge
that the trail starts at the point the license was changed.
This is no different than what happens when an author
"liberates" his own work by re-licensing proprietary content
under a free license.

It should of course, be acknowledged that if round-trip
licensing is permitted (through cooperation with the FSF),
the work could theoretically lose the required history
information through cycling. But of course, conventional
practice would be to include such meta-data whenever
practically possible (by, for example, recovering it from
previous GFDL versions).  I don't think this would be a
matter of legal-force, but it probably doesn't have to be --
there are plenty of reasons for people to want this
information, and the only reason for stripping it is
probably the practical case of stripping all meta-data that
occurs when a work is distributed as a single multimedia
file.

Likewise, if the By-SA requires no title change, then there
should be no need to change the title when it is converted,
although it may then be required of the next author in the
chain.

> Just saying "if you want to release Derivative Work under
> GFDL,  follow its requirements" does not adequately solve
> these  difficult questions.

No, you're right, these issues should probably be spelled
out, but it seems fairly obvious to me what the spelling
ought to be in this case. ;-)

On a side note -- I'm glad this is being discussed. I've
run into similar problems myself (see my discussion of it at
http://blog.freesoftwaremagazine.com/users/t.hancock/2005/10/27/fsm_free_art_and_copyright_conflicts
and the follow-up
http://blog.freesoftwaremagazine.com/users/t.hancock/2005/11/03/free_art_and_copyleft_conflicts_2_the_ra
).  I know those posts raise a number of other issues which
are not the point of this discussion, but copyleft-conflicts
are a serious issue we ought to be thinking about.  I'm
pretty sure that most users of copyleft licenses do not
intend to create these kinds of incompatibilities (if they
did, then we'd have no business talking about
circumventions, but my experience is that most people
contributing free art haven't thought about this kind of
problem seriously -- well, at least not until recently).

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com