Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> Ahh! THAT IS the crux. And the problem revolves around that definition
> of 'freedom', and (and this is important) making sure the results remain
> shared. To ensure the latter part, I have to know what has been changed,
> and how to get my hands on a copy of the derivative!

This was bandied about some time ago with software licenses.
The idea was requiring a downstream author to notify the
original author of any modifications to the original.
The idea was shot down as being far more obnoxious than
the BSD advertising clause and was killed on the spot.

I would agree with the assessment.

It adds extra baggage. And depending on your interpretation,
every downstream author might decide that THEY want to be notified
of every derivative made on their version, which means worst
case that every generation of deriving author needs to modify
all previous generations who decided they wanted to stake a
"notification claim" on the work.

Way too much overhead there.

> If I release a work, I (personally) care not what you do with it, only
> that I KNOW about what you have done. I don't want to stop you doing
> whatever you will with it, and care not about restricting your freedoms.
> But I DO want not only attribution, but also to know HOW it has been
> changed.

If you release the work SA, and something really good is done with
the work, it will be in the public somewhere, and if it's in the
public, you can get it and roll it back in to your version.


> Because it doesn't _enforce_ _sharing_ AFAIK. As I see it, you can
> modify a work, release it under the same license and distribute it as
> you will, and it seems to me that all the License Requirements have been
> met. However, I don't want you only to share it with others, I want you
> to share it with me (or my site-contributors) as well (and unless I know
> about the derivative you are not sharing it with me, only distributing
> it to others). Unless I can enforce (somehow) the sharing side, as
> opposed to the distribution side, I am stuck...

This would not be considered a Free license.
The overhead associated with notification
can accumulate and make it impossible for
downstream modifiers to meet the license
requirements and notify everyone and their
grandmother that they fixed a typo.

You could use CC-ND and require folks to assign
copyright to you for all their additions, then
any modification must go through you, but don't
even think of kidding yourself that it is either
"Free" or any semblance of "Sharing".

You are talking about a market economy license
where the license is designed to benefit you
over everyone else. The thing is that most
contributers will know enough that signing copyright
to you means you could just as easily do a license
fork some time down the road and sell a non-CC license
to some vendor or something. Which means you soak up
all the contributions from people, have them sign
copyright over to you, and then when they've made
the work even better, you have the sole right to sell
it to MajorCorp and leave your contributers in the dust.

If this isn't what you intend, then commit to a
Free license or a Share license from the beginning.

Yes it means you'll have to give up being above
everyone else from a license point of view,
but if the work is good, that shouldn't matter
too much.

If not, don't kid yourself that CC-ND and having
contributers assign copyright to you is anything
resembling Free or Sharing. Or at least, don't
try to kid me.

Greg

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