Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Stefan Tiedje <Stefan-Tiedje AT addcom.de>]

Terry Hancock wrote:
> Opinions? Am I out of my mind? ;-)

All what you propose is already possible:

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

Instead of a "license" which lists licenses, just let the user choose
out of a list of copuleft licenses which already exits, and if they have
a SA clause, the user is free to pass the same choice to his users in
case he made a derivative work.

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

Part of at least some of the copyleft licenses.


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

The main benefit of CC and also GPL is that the intent is easy to
understand, and thats what creative people would want to express.


> 1) Sunset License

Possible today: Just add a text (not part of any license) that after a
certain date the work is public domain or available under a more free
license.

> 2) The Last Act of the Responsible Maintainer
>
> What about when a license dies?

A license never dies, a copyright will expire 75 Years after the creator
died. If you got a license, you got it.

> 3) The Lazy Author License

Is any of the cc licenses. Read it and forget it.

At least out of an original authors view. If you want to make derivative
works it gets more complictated, but any addition to the number of
licenses would make it more complicated, because the probability that
the works I want to incorporate have an incompatible license is higher
as the authors have one more license to choose from.

And if its in the end only the desire to encourage creators to use a 
compatible license, you could as well just encourage them to use the 
existing cc in favour of any other because its compatible with itself ;-)

I have the feeling this jurismatic discussion is loosing the focus on 
simplicity, the only issue which really matters. The free licenses are 
much more about easy communication than anything else. Most artist do 
not want to deal with legal issues, they want to be respected and it 
only needs a way to express it. All the cc variants are a simple way to 
express what the copyright holder wants, or don't want.
Different licenses have different advantages and pitfalls. They are 
different because they need to be different. Compatibility is neither 
required nor wanted.

The demand of compatibility is just the demand of creators who want to 
make derivative works out of different licensed sources. The only way I 
see, is to ask those who use an incompatible license to allow the use 
under a different license and thats it. Might be tedious, but I don't 
believe in a 'one size fits all' license. (Otherwise there would be only 
one cc license, but its more than one for very good reasons)

Stefan

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        Stefan Tiedje
        Klanggestalter
    Electronic Composition
              &
        Improvisation

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