Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

On 19 May 2006, at 20:21, Greg London wrote:

> > My question, to reiterate, is 'What's the difference between a
> > "NON-copyleft free license" (e.g. MIT, BSD, CC-By) and "Public  
> > Domain"?'
>
> The only practical difference that I know of occurs for licenses
> that have accumulative requirements.

Yes attribution. That, and a copyright is retained, so the work could  
be relicensed proprietary (but not exclusively).

> The CC-Wiki license fixes the cululative effect of the CC-BY,
> because it allows attribution to be handed over to a single
> website or similar organization.

CC-Wiki became the 2.5 group attribution clause. The Wiki badge just  
redirects to BY-SA 2.5 .

IANAL but this clashes with the moral right of attribution and so IMO  
really should not be used outside the US, or in international  
projects. I personally think the solution is FSF-style assignment,  
not attribution hacks.

> The only other difference I can think of relates to Moral Rights.
> I'm not so familiar with all the details of Moral Rights,
> but my understanding is that they cannot be licensed away.

They can be waived in Canada and the UK but elsewhere they are  
inalienable. The CC-UK licences (for Scotland and for England &  
Wales) explicitly retains the right of integrity, I think the CC-CA  
license leaves the option open for the licensor.

I do not, personally, think that Founders should be a module. It is a  
very elegant solution, but we just need one case of someone deciding  
they don't want their work to become BY after 5 years for this to be  
a PR (and ethical) disaster. Founders has already been used for FUD.

Possibly CC could work with a third party to do a time-release  
scheme, but I don't think CC should do it themselves, and I do not  
think time-release is a good idea. We need less uncertainty and  
conditions in copyright, not more.

- Rob.