Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Francesco Poli <frx AT firenze.linux.it>]

On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:51:19 +0000 rob AT robmyers.org wrote:

> Quoting Francesco Poli <frx AT firenze.linux.it>:
> 
> > I understand this, but, as I said, I think that clarity on which
> > parts are NC-specific, SA-specific, and/or nonND-specific is
> > unsatisfactory.
> 
> I always assume that anything that refers to not being allowed to sell
> or modify
> the work is NC or ND. ;-)

I also used this kind of heuristics, as you probably saw, but having an
official indication from Creative Commons would have saved a bit of
uncertainty...

> 
> >> I disagree that removing a credit at all interferes with the
> >freedom > to modify.
> >
> > It forbids me to state a true fact in a modified version of the
> > work, namely that the modified version is based on the original work
> > by the original author.
> 
> Moral rights will allow this to be stripped anyway I think. Placing
> this fact into the license saves time, money and trouble. I think the
> original user's name will appear in the copyright list, though.

Moral rights vary wildly from one jurisdiction to another: if some moral
right regimes are too restrictive and even forbid me to state true and
uncontested facts about my modifications, why extend this problem to
other jurisdictions where moral rights are more permissive?

Make no mistake, I'm not against all moral rights, but I think that some
of them are too extreme in some jurisdictions, doing more harm than
good.
I would rather avoid talking about interactions between moral rights and
free software, though, because it would really open a can of worms... 
:-|

> 
> > What do you mean by "associated with"?
> > Do you mean that the original author is held responsible for the
> > content of the modified work?  That his/her reputation can be hurt
> > by the content of the modified work?
> > I'm not at all convinced that this is the case
> 
> Moral Rights law does hold that misattribution of work or mistreatment
> of work is harmful for the author's reputation.

Fine, but this is *not* misattribution of the work.
As long as it's clear that the original author just created the original
work, and that someone else created the modified work basing it on the
original work, no misattribution is going on, IMO.

> 
> > And I think that "This Adaptation is based on the Work _foo_ by
> > James O. Hacker" clearly explains that James O. Hacker just created
> > the Work _foo_, while the Adaptation was created by someone else.
> 
> This depends on the strength of the Moral Rights laws in various
> countries.

No, this depends on the average intelligence of the reader of the
sentence...

[...]
> > As I stated, I think that this is a significant restriction on the
> > freedom to modify the work.
> 
> I would disagree with this. The DFSG explicitly allow the requirement
> that modified works be marked as such,

The modified work *is* being marked as such in my example: "This
Adaptation is based on the Work _foo_ by James O. Hacker" is quite
different from "This work is titled _foo_ and was written by James O.
Hacker".

> moral rights ensure that
> authors cannot be associated with works they have not written, and the
> FDL and GPL allow non-endorsement.

Please point me to the clause in the GNU GPL v2 that forbids me to
distribute a modified version of the Linux kernel where I state
something like this: "This is a modified kernel by Francesco Poli, based
on the official Linux version 2.6.19.2 by Linus Torvalds and others".
I'm not aware of any reason why I should consider this as being
disallowed.

[...]
> > I think that human judgement is needed even for checking whether two
> > credits are equally prominent, hence the current situation is no
> > simpler than the one I imagined.
> 
> The current situation is equivalent to adding one's name to a
> changelog or AUTHORS file. What it lacks in subtlety or fairness it
> makes up for in ease of compliance.

I don't think that requiring credits "at least as prominent as the
credits for the other authors" even for contributions that are not
comparable to others is easy to comply with.  Actually, what seems
reasonable and natural to do may well be to give less prominent credit
for those contributions.  A counter-intuitive clause is not easier to
comply with than an intuitive one...


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