Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

I've been thinking about this problem for some time, as
well, and not too long ago I got bit by it.[1]

A couple of days ago I started thinking though, that we may
be going about this in the wrong way by trying to alter
CC-BY-SA, GFDL, GPL, and a dozen other copyleft licenses so
that they are compatible. (Even if indeed we are only
discussing the CC license here, the problem is much larger
than that).

First of all, none of this works unless:

1) The explicit licenses to allow conversion to are listed.

2) The licensor specifically grants the right for later
versions of licenses to be used.

Note that this must be done *for every license* which
participates (and #1 requires constant revision as a
result).

So -- there goes some of the functionality. I can't solve
those problems, but given that they are there, it seems to
me that there is an equally simple, and probably much more
maintainable solution:

Write a new "universal donor" license whose only purpose is
to allow interconversion.  Then include *this* license by
reference (including the "or any later version" language)
into the licenses of organizations who want to cooperate. 

This is the licensing equivalent of having a "standard
interchange format" -- instead of writing and maintaining
case-by-case language for "choose two of all
interconvertable licenses", each license writes a clause to
convert to this "Universal Copyleft License" (UCL).

Then a group of interested people (be it CC, FSF, Debian,
SPI, or OSI) maintains this license with all the necessary
"registered" licenses listed. (Who cares the most? Is it
Creative Commons?).

Organizations can choose whether they think that "minimal
copyleft" is indeed their intent, and users of licenses
which aren't explicitly so, can overrule by simply
dual-licensing under this minimal license (hence expressing
their intent to allow interconversion, and avoid the sticky
ethical issues implied by imposing such interconvertability
post facto).

Naturally, if this idea caught on, there would have to ensue
an enormous project to get authors to add a "relicense to
UCL" clause (because not every major license is going to
incorporate it -- I particularly doubt that the FSF will,
since their licenses have very specific intents beyond
copyleft, such as free availability of "source" data). But
it seems to me that this kind of campaign will have to be
fought anyway, because there is so much material under
incompatible licenses (for example, most of Wikipedia
under the GFDL, which I've read a lot of complaints about).

I don't know if this proposed license ought to be a CC
license (perhaps an extra "module" as someone previously
mentioned (I read it in the archives before joining)), or if
it ought to exist somewhere else.  I also don't really
know how to write it (not being a lawyer), but it would
need to exist alongside a list or registry of "approved"
licenses, which would require frequent updates -- and
discussion about it.

All of the registered licenses would be ones whose *intent*
is apparently:

1) To ensure free redistribution without use restrictions,
field of endeavor restrictions, or class of user
restrictions.

2) To ensure continued copyleft by keeping the work under a
copyleft license which continues requirement #1

3) Which do not impose undue additional restrictions.


USE CASES

Now the most obvious use case is the creation of a standard
point of interchange for licenses which already have just
this intent, and not much more, who want to ensure that they
can "interoperate". But there are at least three others I
can think of:

1) Sunset License

If a user wants a kind of "sunset clause" on more
restrictive licensing, they can obviously commit the work to
the public domain after a given time, or give a date for
conversion to the AFL/MIT/BSD non-copyleft free license. The
UCL would allow them to do this without losing the copyleft,
but still allow much more interoperability.

2) The Last Act of the Responsible Maintainer

What about when a license dies? I got bit because the
maintainer of the Design Science License decided he had
lost, and didn't want to maintain the license (probably
because the CC-BY-SA has the same intent and is a better
written and maintained license (?)).  He could, as a last
act of maintaining it, provide a "this license may be
converted" clause. This "UCL" would be the logical choice,
because it would allow the work to be shared with any of
several different license communities, instead of forcing
one.

3) The Lazy Author License

Most of the time, when I try to get people to contribute
work, they aren't concerned so much about the licensing.
They want an "easy answer" without having to think about all
the legal consequences.  A Universal Copyleft License would
allow them to shrug this off without having to go so far as
a non-copyleft license -- they wouldn't have to pick GPL,
GFDL, BY-SA or whatever, they can just say "Yeah, whatever"
and be done with it. So in this sense, it could be used
as a original license, to be converted at will.

Traditions are as important as licenses in the
free-licensing community. The standard GPL license grant
boilerplate is just that: a tradition -- nobody REQUIRES you
to use the FSF's language when assigning your work to GPL
licensing, but almost every work does in fact use it. It's
from this boilerplate that the "or any later version" clause
got started.

In the case of this "UCL", then, it would be a good idea
to encourage the continuance and separation of UCL-licensed
content, in the same way that we encourage the continuance
and separation of non-copyleft work. Usually, in a GPL work
that contains BSD/AFL/MIT work, that work will be included
in a separate directory and so marked, so that it's not hard
to separate it out from the work that is GPLd. This is NOT
required by these licenses -- only attribution is. But
people do it, because it's convenient.

I would suggest doing the same thing with stuff under such
a "UCL" license, because it would then remain
re-licensable, so that a minimum amount of license community
lock-in is created.

Opinions? Am I out of my mind? ;-)

Cheers,
Terry

[1]Detailed discussion of my particular problem is in my
blog at Free Software Magazine:

http://blog.freesoftwaremagazine.com/users/t.hancock/2005/10/27/fsm_free_art_and_copyright_conflicts
http://blog.freesoftwaremagazine.com/users/t.hancock/2005/11/03/free_art_and_copyleft_conflicts_2_the_ra

this raises other issues to, of course.


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