Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <greglondon.1 AT gmail.com>]

On 4/25/07, Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com> wrote:

Greg London wrote:
> On 4/25/07, matt draghi <mattdraghi AT hotmail.com > wrote:
>> Does anyone know if there is a license for share alike, not requiring
>> attribution?
>
> You can use ShareAlike. And then simply not provide any attribution
> information.
> see paragraph 4.c of this:
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Ick, no! People do this all the time, not usually with this intent. It
just creates the impression that compliance is impossible.

 

For the record, I do not quite share Terry Hancock's vehemence on this
issue, however, he's not wrong...  
 

I just wish the license contained the text that says how to provide

the information while specifcially waiving attribution as a requirement.

 

is "Attribution is waived for John Smith." enough?

 

Is it clear that this waiver should remain with the license as it passes

from one downstream user to the next? Is the "attribution is waived for John Smith"

a waiver you have to attach to every copy of the work that gets passed around?

 

It is very unintuitive that you have to go out of your way doing extra

work to tell people they don't have to go out of their way to attribute you.

 

Alice waives attribution.

Bob creates a derivative but wants attribution.

 

Charlie wants to create a derivative and sees that Alice and Bob both

contributed to the current version. Unless the waiver specifically says

"Alice waives attribution", he won't know he doesn't have to waive it.

But that means that rather than waive attribution, you instead have to

make sure the waiver goes everywhere the work goes.

 

It's just a bit weird.