Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mia Garlick <mia AT creativecommons.org>]

Version 3.0 - Revised License Drafts

Attachment: BY-NC-SA v 3 (102506) (US).pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

Attachment: BY-NC-SA v3 (102506) (unported).pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

So there have been several new amendments to the licenses — mainly as  
a result of the discussions on the cc-licenses list, but some as a  
result of discussions internally and amongst CC's international  
affiliates.  A first round of comments to the cc-licenses list  
discussions was posted back at the beginning of September (http:// 
lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2006-September/004027.html)  
but the bulk of discussions took place after this posting. The issue  
of the DRM parallel distribution language was debated in earnest.   
Ultimately, however, the general sentiment on the list does not seem  
to favor  implementation of the DRM parallel distribution language at  
this stage.

To briefly explain the current round of amendments:

# New language has been included in the second introductory paragraph  
of the license to ensure that the license language is not interpreted  
by a court so as to require that the license be held to be a contract  
but rather to enable the agreement to be interpreted as a license, or  
in the alternative, as a contract.

# Definition of Collection (new generic) & Collective Work (new US) -  
this definition has been tweaked to clarify that it intends to apply  
to all types of copyright protected materials (in the case of the new  
generic); and, that the definition applies to the collocation of more  
than one works (in the case of both licenses) rather than just three  
or more.

# Clause 2 (new generic) - the title has been changed to "Fair  
Dealing Rights" in place of "Fair Use Rights" to ensure that it is  
clear what is covered by this clause in the majority of jurisdictions  
around the world, which have fair dealing.

# Clauses 4(a) & (b) (both licenses) - language has been introduced  
to clarify that the anti-TPM restriction does not apply to private  
copying, only when a work is being shared.

# Clause 4(a) (both licenses) - the ShareAlike condition has been  
clarified to confirm that the other jurisdiction licenses under which  
an SA-licensed work can be relicensed must be of the same license  
version or later (consistent with relicensing under the same  
jurisdiction/generic license).

# Clause 4(e) (new generic) - this clause has been substantially  
revised since the first draft was circulated on the list.  The  
revisions reflect the ongoing work of the CC Working Group that has  
been set up to look at the issue of CC licenses and collecting  
societies and represents the agreed on policy for CC licenses going  
forward as regards the collection of collecting society royalties by  
CC licensors.  It is designed to take into account the different  
systems that exist in different countries and will be reflected in  
the jurisdiction licenses that version to 3.0.

# Clause 4(f) (new generic) - this clause has been amended to make an  
exception to the retention of the moral right of integrity for  
jurisdictions such as Japan.

# Renaming the "generic" - as you can see from these license drafts,  
we are proposing to rename the generic to "unported."  This  
description reflects the terminology used by CC since the  
international license porting process began - we refer to the process  
of adapting a license for a particular jurisdiction as "porting."  It  
was felt that new terminology was needed to avoid giving people an  
inaccurate impression that the "generic" license was somehow  
international or more suited to online usage than the "ported"  
licenses.  CC will be releasing by the end of the year, some  
guidelines to better clarify the issue of which license to select.

As noted above, these changes, for the most part, reflect list  
discussions and so hopefully a large amount of further discussion is  
not necessary and version 3.0 can be implemented shortly.  However,  
if there are further errors or issues identified by people then the  
discussions will continue for as long as necessary to resolve these.