Development of Creative Commons licenses

["White, Phil" <Phil.White AT rjah.nhs.uk>]

Hi Drew,

> I think I see what you are getting at, but have you tried putting
yourself
> in the other party's shoes and thinking what can go wrong from their
point
> of view.

:) Yes, honestly, I have! In fact, that is why I actually feel strongly
about this. If I were just acting as publisher, there probably wouldn't
be a problem, because I would be interested in the site. But I have in
the past authored official docs, and unless I'm prepared to continually
'chase up what my baby is doing', no-one else really considers about
telling me - it just isn't done. Incidentally, there is also a degree of
non-attributed plagiarism going on as well.

> I do know that the right to fork is very important in Free Software.
How
> would your proposed system preserve this right if it would?

Good question. Do I fear a fork? Not really - but we have a different
scenario here. Take software, and you (usually) have a public website to
co-ordinate the fork. Take a text document from my proposed site, fork
it, and it is going to end up on a private intranet. If I were an
author, I would not like that. I currently feel that it is OK to fork a
document and then put it elsewhere on my site, because it guarantees
access by others; but don't fork it where the original authors can't
access it.

In short, whatever type of work we talk about, I believe that an author
has the right to know what is done with his work (even if he might not
approve) _if_he_so_wishes_. This is _MY_ definition of sharing (which is
wrong, I might add). I still maintain that to take a work, modify it,
and _DISTRIBUTE_ it to (say) 10 people _PRIVATELY_ is NOT sharing (in
the spirit of the word), even if all the current license conditions are
met.

Which, sadly, leads me to believe that, at the moment I am stuck with
either releasing any downloaded document under a No-Derivative clause,
having a new copyright policy written, or changing my viewpoint - none
of which I really want to do ;-) Perhaps I'll feel different tomorrow!

Ps. I'm really sorry about the lack of threading here. You can guess
which email client we have installed here... :(

--
Best regards,

Phil.