Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

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.