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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] CC Response re: Proposed FDL one-way compatibility wording

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] CC Response re: Proposed FDL one-way compatibility wording
  • Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:38:38 +0000

On 17 Dec 2005, at 00:49, Mia Garlick wrote:

I have attempted to distill the main arguments and concerns (that were not necessarily fully address by list members themselves) in the attached table and then included a specific response to each one that hopefully address each of them.

Thank you for this very clear and informative document.

Some comments, numbered after the sections they refer to:

1. Although BY-SA and the FDL both use copyleft, they have been written with very different aims in mind and this is reflected in their non-copyleft features. BY-SA is a remix culture license with attribution added, so it has the group attribution and attribution URL provisions. The FDL is a free software manual license that allows personal opinions to be attached, so it has the print run and invariant section provisions. A user can therefore do or require things under each license that they cannot under the other and that will be lost in translation between the licenses. And each license makes different demands of its users. These are incompatibilities, and even if they do not amount to legal incompatibility they may amount to incompatibility of effect.


2. Multi-licensing seems to be covered by this proposal from Lessig:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5709
But that has its own problems. BBC-CA is not compatible with BY-SA or the FDL because it is both non-commercial and geographically limited. As a license fee payer, I would prefer CC to publicly criticise the BBC for not choosing BY-SA and pressure them to correct this mistake rather than working to make BY-SA compatible with the CA licence or encouraging people to use BBC-CA.


3. I am very interested in this new FSF document license. Would CC be willing to wait for the FSF to release a draft of this license and having it as the target for BY-SA compatibility? I feel quite strongly that this is worth considering.

Invariant Sections are *designed* for controversial opinions. :-) The FSF says :
"The idea of invariant sections is that they give you a way to express nontechnical personal opinions about the topic.
The classical example of an invariant nontechnical section in a free manual is the GNU Manifesto"

Criticism can be added under BY-SA, but it can be removed in derivatives. Under the FDL, criticism can be added but made such that it cannot be removed. This is an important difference from BY-SA. And fair use for critique or review does not reproduce the effects of BY- SA IMHO.


6. Lessig's meta-licensing proposal (see 2.) would lead to poems being placed under the FDL.

People will not always choose a license to best contribute to the commons or to make re-use of work easy. Some people will mis-use license features to gain the best commercial advantage or to cause mischief, and we must consider such "exploits" when discussing licenses.


7. The differences between FDL and BY-SA may be less important than compatibility is from a moral viewpoint, or it may be that the negative practical effects of these differences will be less than the positive practical effects of compatibility. But either of these cases require strong argument as to why the price of negative effects is worth paying.


And a question:

What is CC's position on the moral implications of allowing derivatives of existing BY-SA work to be placed under the FDL (or the new FSF license) by virtue of the derivative upgrade clause in the 2.x licenses? (Unless I have misunderstood this as well, in which case I apologise).


Thanks.

- Rob.




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