Development of Creative Commons licenses

[James Grimmelmann <james AT grimmelmann.net>]

rob AT robmyers.org wrote:
> Image libraries seem to have no trouble defining the circumstances in 
> which use
> of their copyrighted material requires payment, or the scope and nature of use
> that they will consider at all. They do not use an existing narrow right, they
> use an existing blanket right and give permission to exercise this right in
> narrow circumstances with carefully worded limits and requirements.
>
> So real-world experience shows that the case of illustrations doesn't 
> need a new
> narrow right, it doesn't need the meaning of any legal terms to be 
> changed, and
> it doesn't need the scope of the license to be limited discretely by the
> terminology used by the law.
>
> For a copyleft license the case of illustration needs the scope of the license
> to expand to cover reproduction in a few carefully defined cases where
> reproduction rather than derivation creates a context where "share and share
> alike" is broken.

Something I have been wondering about is whether there would be a way to 
use license compatibility to:
(1) keep BY-SA itself unchanged,
(2) create a more stringent BY-StrictSA for photographers who object to 
this use,
(3) allow works formed from the combination of BY-SA and BY-StrictSA 
works to be redistributed under some SA-type license, and
(4) not allow an end run around the goals of either license.

The point is that those who like BY-SA with its current GPL-ish level of 
restriction and those who would prefer a stricter BY-StrictSA that would 
have the share-alike provision kick in sooner are both looking for a 
good share-alike license.  Unlike with NC, neither of them wants to put 
additional restrictions on how the work is used; they just disagree 
about how broadly the share-alike rule should apply.  A good 
compatibility scheme might mitigate some of the dangers of creating new 
kinds of SA licenses.

I remain skeptical of what I'm calling the StrictSA project, but the 
discussion over it is opening up some very interesting and important 
possibilities.

James