Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mia Garlick <mia AT creativecommons.org>]

ok, so i must confess that in my many years of drafting and reviewing  
and negotiating licenses, "including without limitation" has never  
been understood to mean "you may disregard that which is listed here"  
but instead to mean "you must at a minimum have regard to these  
things but may also have regard to things that we cannot foresee  
yet"....it's the whole exhaustive list issue with the language  
intended to show that the list is not exhaustive...

obviously, the purpose of including these two baseline conditions is  
to give people comfort that CC will consider these two conditions at  
least or as a minimum.

so let's try to get agreement...i don't like the "at least" language  
but wondered if we could all agree on this: "including, at a minimum,  
because that license.."

what say you??

On Feb 12, 2007, at 6:33 PM, James Grimmelmann wrote:

> Mia Garlick wrote:
> > so i always appreciate feedback on how to draft things better,
> > especially when we are trying to forge new ground...i guess though,
> > that i am not convinced that the issues identified here warrant the
> > changes suggested....my sense is that the objection is more a
> > stylistic one to the phrase "including without limitation" .... than
> > to the actual structure...but maybe i'm wrong...
>
> I think that is right.  Given your concerns about timing and
> flexibility, I agree that getting compatibility language into the 3.0
> versioning, and soon, are important goals.  While I disagree that  
> these
> conditions should be in the license at all, I would not want my  
> concerns
> to block this important change.
>
> As you note, however, I remain very worried about the phrase  
> "including
> without limitation."  To me the natural reading, in context, was  
> that CC
> could approve a license that had the same terms, purpose, and effect,
> but was also allowed to approve a license that did not.  I hear you to
> be saying, though, that intention of that section was to indicate that
> CC might impose additional conditions in addition to make sure that  
> the
> license remained essentially equivalent.
>
> Have I just been ruined by law school to insist on overly-close
> readings, or would the new paragraph express the desired sentiment  
> more
> clearly if "including without limitation" were simply dropped?  Or
> replaced with "at the least"?
>
> These questions are all, as you say, stylistic, but past experience on
> this list has shown that handling stylistic details well is good
> future-proofing.
>
> James
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