Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Jonathon Blake" <jonathon.blake AT gmail.com>]

On 2/13/07, tomislav medak wrote:

> first reason would be: how do you define 'free'?, or rather 'freedoms',
> or 'free enough' to be called that. for instance, freedom to share
> licensed works is given by all standard CC licenses and it is a freedom.

First, get rid of CC as a brand name. Keep the name for the
organization, if you so desire.

Debian Legal has a set of four definitions,and three tests that can be
used to determine whether  or not something is "free". Anything which
passes all of those criteria is "free".  Call that the _Free Content
Licence_.

The BY and BY-SA variants can be called the _Free Authors Licence_.

BY-NC-ND can be relabelled as _The Usage is Banned Licence_

The other NC variants can be called _The Free Non Commercial Licence_.

The other ND variants can be called  _Banned Derivatives Licence_

Give each set of licences a distinctly different logo.  Not just
different colours, but different shapes and motifs.   [Use a green
dollar sign on a bronze circle for the ND variants. Use a gold circle
on a purple square for the _Free  Non Commercial Licence_.  Use a
black skull and cross bones on a  red triangle for _The Usage is
Banned Licence_ Use a orange rectangle for the _Free Authors Licence_.
Use a pale blue  hexagon for the _Free Content Licence_. ]

> than BY and BY-SA, and 'non-free' is yet again a lot more less precise
> than BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, etc. this would be a step back from what we have
> gained with new buttons.

With the new icons one still has to go back to the licence,to
determine which it is.
[And it doesn't help that the search engines don't differentiate
between the different licences.]

> i really understand the problem with the example you give, but someone
> creating FLOSS should really know better than confuse ND with free software.

I was surprised to see the NC-ND licence used within that project.
Especially since the code was GNU GPL. But such things  are going to
occur,until the CC brand name is history, having been replaced by at
least six distinctly different licences,none of which have
names,logos, or anything else that resemble the others in any way.

xan

jonathon