Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Antoine <antoine AT pitrou.net>]

Hi,

As mentioned by Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, the Free Art License is
quietly progressing towards releasing its version 1.3.
The French version of the license text is nearly finalized and will
certainly be soon published. Translations (which are just literal
translations and not adaptations) will follow when available.

To make a long story short, here are the most noticeable improvements :
 - add a provision for compatibility with other licenses
 - add a provision about related rights
 - add a provision for integrating a FAL-licensed work in a non-FAL
licensed work (a bit similar, but with more generic language, to what
the GPL defines as aggregation)
 - a revised preamble to better state the spirit and goals of the
license
 - many linguistic improvements to make the license clearer and more
robust in an international context

As an interesting twist, although both groups have scarcely
communicated, the compatibility scheme chosen for the FAL 1.3 is similar
to the one chosen by the CC BY-SA 3.0. There is a formal clause in the
FAL 1.3 defining the criteria for an other license to be declared
compatible, and the list of officially compatible licenses will be
published and maintained (as a resource separate from the license) by
initiators of the Copyleft Attitude movement.

Here are the compatibility criteria as defined by the FAL 1.3 (this is a
quick translation by me, not the official English text which will
certainly be written more carefully):

 1. that the other license allows to copy, distribute and modify copies
of the work, including for commercial purposes, and without other
restrictions than what those compatibility criteria mandate
 2. that the other license guarantees authorship (a.k.a attribution)
and, wherever possible, access to previous versions of the work
 3. that the other license also declares the FAL 1.3 as a compatible
license (i.e. reciprocity)
 4. that the other license mandates derived works (a.k.a modified
copies) to be distributed either under the same license or a compatible
one (including of course the FAL 1.3)

Regards

Antoine Pitrou.