Development of Creative Commons licenses

[rob AT robmyers.org]

Quoting Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>:

> In legal terms, the earlier "license grant" (not the
> license) "includes by reference" the later license, which
> can *legally* include any terms it wants. It could convert
> ALL BY-SA content to AFL or MIT licenses and allow any form
> of relicensing, including proprietary.

Does this mean that NC could be upgraded to allow commercial use?

> The problem is that this would be a major *ethical*
> betrayal.

Yes.

> Whenever people use the "or any later version"
> clause, they open themselves up to this kind of betrayal.
> That's why you have to really trust the institution you
> put that kind of trust in.
>
> But there's no *legal* obstacle.

Erk. Are you certain about that? If CC rewrote NC to allow commercial 
use, large
numbers of people would suffer measurable harm. Is there really no 
legal course
of action people could take to prevent this?

> That's why some projects
> prefer not to use "or any later version" with the GPL (I
> don't recall if you have an option with By-SA, I think the
> language may actually be in the license itself?).

The option to relicense derivatives (not initial works) is contained 
within the
BY-SA 2.x license itself.

> So, to clarify, are you questioning this clause on a
> *legal* or *ethical* basis?  I refute the former, but the
> latter is certainly debatable.

I'm questioning the relicensing clause for ethical reasons but I'd much rather
have a legal basis.

BY-SA states that you can only upgrade (or crossgrade, to an international
license) to a CC license with the same license elements (BY and SA). If the
license elements can be arbitrarily redefined then that statement is rendered
all but meaningless.

- Rob.