Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Luis Villa" <luis AT tieguy.org>]

Hey, all-

A few quick questions :) Some of these may already have been answered;
if so, I apologize and would love links to the date/subject where it
was covered so I can look it up in the archives. Thanks.

*The CC draft uses 'Work' and 'Adaptation' in parallel clauses that
are typically nearly identical. I found GPL v3's usage of a 'covered
work', defined to be 'either the unmodified Program or a work based on
the Program', much more clear. The duplication in cc v3 often makes it
(in my opinion) hard to find the distinction between works and
programs. Would it perhaps be possible to define 'Covered Works' as
'The Work, or any Adaptation thereof', and then simplify (for example)
Section 3 to read:

License Grant...
(a)    to Reproduce the Covered Work, to incorporate the Covered Work
into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the Covered Work as
incorporated in the Collections; provided that any Adaptation so
Covered, including any translation in any medium, takes reasonable
steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes
were made to the original Work. For example, a translation could be
marked "The original work was translated from English to Spanish," or
a modification could indicate "The original work has been modified."
(b)    to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Covered Work including
as incorporated in Collections;

This to me is much simplified over the current 3.a-d. Section 4.a and
4.b could probably similarly be merged/clarified.

* Relatedly, why is the Work available 'only under the terms of this
license' (4.b) but Adaptations get additional permissions? (Probably
an obvious answer, but I don't see it. :)

* in 3.b, must the labeling/identifying of changes be in the work
itself, or would it be sufficient to have them outside the work, for
example, in the description of the link? I assume the latter, but it
might be good to make this slightly more clear. (Tangentially, this
seems like an odd clause to me- is there actually a demonstrated need
for this? We seem to get along OK in Free Software without any
equivalent.)

* FSF believes there are practical problems with the use of
'Distribute' in a generic/international license:

http://gplv3.fsf.org/denationalization-dd2.html

Has CC looked at this discussion? Is there any intent to replace the
Distribute/Publicly Perform language with something more
jurisdiction-neutral in the generic license?

* Similarly, the use of 'effective technological measures' in 4.b
seems very US-specific- that is straight out of DMCA, no? (I thought
the gpl v3 second draft had comments that addressed this specific
phrase, but I can't find them at the moment.)

* in 4.d.i., there appears to be a missing ) after Attribution
Parties, at least in my pdf. :)

* 4.f. ('You must not distort...which would be prejudicial
to the Original Author's honor...') seems like it induces a strong
chilling effect  on derivative works, given the impossibility of
understanding the cultural contexts of honor or reputation of the
original author. Pragmatically, it seems to make this license
practically like ND- is this the intent? or does the 'except as
permitted by applicable law' clause give non-author's rights countries
an out here?

Anyway, this looks like generally a solid and incremental improvement-
thanks much to all involved.

Luis