Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Shalon Wood <dstar AT pele.cx>]

There are three main issues which cause authors to refuse to allow
(or, at least, condone) fanfic of their work. One of these is not
ameliorable by any means other than a change of heart on the author's
part; the other two, however, should be ameliorable by a CC license, I
believe.

The first issue is that the author wishes to retain complete control
over their work and its derivatives. Obviously, there is nothing that
can be done about this case; it's a matter of personal choice by the
author.

The second issue is the fear that if they do not aggressively pursue
violations of copyright in the case of fanfic, they will lose the
right to pursue commercial copyright violations. There are apparently
a large number of lawyers who believe that, like trademarks, copyright
must be defended or lost, and who advise their clients of this. In the
US, at least, this isn't the case, though I don't know about other
countries.

I suspect that the existence of an explicit license (BY-SA-NC, for
example) would solve this issue automatically; if the fanfic author is
complying with a license, they are by definition not violating
copyright, so even given this misapprehension of copyright law,
there's no problem.

The final issue, however, is a bit stickier. This is the fear by the
original author that they will be sued by a fanfic author for
'stealing' a plot or idea, even if the original author has never read
the fanfic in question. This is, unfortunately, not an unfounded
fear, and I'm not sure if any of the licenses offer a
solution. BY-SA would do it, as the original author would
automatically have the right to use any of the ideas in the derivative
work. Unfortunately, this would also risk losing the chance to license
the movie rights seperately. I doubt that any of the large movie
companies would be willing to put their adaptation of the work under a
BY-SA license, but the fear would probably keep a publisher from
agreeing to allow an author to use this license.

BY-SA-NC would fix that problem, but if I understand correctly, it
wouldn't allow the original author to use items from the derivative
works in a commercial manner...which means it wouldn't solve the
original problem.

Do any of the CC licenses solve the final problem without creating
worse problems? Or is an author stuck creating their own license based
on BY-SA-NC?

Shalon Wood