Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Wed, 2007-24-01 at 09:15 -0500, James Grimmelmann wrote:

> > But as of
> > late, he decided to put a license on the specification document, which
> > is to be submited to the IETF as an RFC.
> > 
> > The license he chose was CC-BY-ND,

> Net takeaway: ND is ineffectual here.  It might help prevent some drift 
> in the official standards document, but as long as that's available 
> someplace canonical, there's no serious worry that the 
> description-of-what-is would drift anyway.  Given that, CC-BY seems like 
> a perfectly reasonable license for the description.

I'd have to disagree. The IETF has its own idiosyncratic copyright rules
for RFCs and other contributions. It's worth reviewing RFC 3978, which I
think is the latest update to these rules:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3978.txt

The usual deal with RFCs is that they may be copied verbatim by the
public in any medium, for commercial or non-commercial use. Derivative
works may also be published as part of the RFC framework. This is pretty
close to the by-nd license terms, at least in spirit, but there are some
twists and turns that may be incompatible with by-nd.

In other words, if you're going the RFC route, it's probably best to not
screw around with CC licenses and just stick with the IETF's rules.

-Evan


________________________________________________________________________
Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>
http://evan.prodromou.name/

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