Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Peter Brink <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>]

drew Roberts skrev:
>
> I have heard these "private" take arguments as to meaning before. I am
> not disagreeing with the take, but the take will seriously complicate
> the reuse / remix  value for CC licensed works (and not just NC at
> that) - Can you imagine a work making use of tne or twenty NC works?
> And some multigenerational at that? And the take of all of those
> people as to what NC means giverns the final use?

This is not something that is particular to CC's licenses. It's the same 
for all open source/content licenses. The meaning of any agreement 
between two parties is really based on the common understanding of the 
parties. What CC thinks really doesn't matter much. The licensor is 
quite free to offer an explanation to how he understand the terms under 
which he offers grant rights to use his work. The opposite is not true 
however. Unless the licensee contacts the licensor and negotiate a 
common understanding of a term there is no way for him to affect the 
definition of unclear terms. The only path open to him is to use the 
standard methods used for interpretating contracts.

If the licensor's explanation is not totally out of line it's therefore 
likely to form the base of any interpretations of any unclear or 
ambiguous parts of the license. The only thing CC can do to help is 
making sure there's a minimum of ambiguous terms or words in the 
license. Non-commercial is unfortunately an example of a fairly 
imprecise term, which opens up the possibility of wildly varying ways of 
interpreting that particular part of the license.

/Peter Brink