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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Is BY-ND a good choice for an Internet XML-based protocol specification?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: James Grimmelmann <james AT grimmelmann.net>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Is BY-ND a good choice for an Internet XML-based protocol specification?
  • Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:41:49 -0500

Evan Prodromou wrote:
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

These rules are not quite on point. They relate to the rights that contributors and editors grand to the IETF itself to copy and modify submissions in the process of producing and distributing standards. The IETF allows contributors to state limitations (sec. 5.2), but the IETF doesn't attempt to enforce its own limitations through this RFC.

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.

My point was that many of the ND restrictions are unenforceable under U.S. copyright law, and the same applies to this statement of IETF RFC policies. Certainly the positive grants can be relied on (anyone can make verbatim copies), but my take is also that many non-verbatim copies are legal.

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.

This strikes me as sensible; if you're going to the IETF, follow IETF rules. Just don't expect those rules to suffice to prevent forking and incompatibility.

James




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