Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Evan Prodromou wrote:
> Are you talking about the clause that lets users of *-SA-licenced works
> licence derivative works under a later version of the licence?

Yes.

> I don't think you can automatically relicence the entire wiki, unless
> you use language in your terms to allow it.

Well, ISTM, that a wiki is a constantly changing work, so it's simple
enough to make it transition from 2.5 to 3.0 in the process of updating.

Technically, of course, the wiki up to the moment of the change is still
under the terms of the 2.5 version. But if changes from that moment on
are under a terms of use that is based on release under 3.0 terms, then
as soon as they are combined with the existing work, it transitions to
version 3.0.

You're under no obligation to make the old version continuously
available. So if there were some reason why a user wanted to remain
under the 2.5 terms, they could just make sure they have a copy of the
earlier work, but the site has no obligation to make that easier (and
frankly, there aren't enough reasons why anyone would care, IMHO).

Also, there is considerable fogginess over whether a "wiki page" or a
"wiki site" is a "work" for the purposes of copyright. If the latter,
then certainly there is no question. If the former, then it might be
ambiguous.

In the end, though, I don't think that is really a question about what
you can legally do with the wiki site's terms so much as it is a
question about what the legal status of individual components of the
wiki actually will be after you do it. IOW, there may be components that
are still technically under the 2.5 license until they are modified
(under the "HTML page = work" theory).

But maybe the really proper way to do it is to say precisely that
changes added after the date are CC-*-3.0 and that pages modified after
that date therefore fall under the 3.0 license, whereas old, unmodified
pages are still under 2.5. You could even make it display the license
according to the modification date if you wanted to get picky about it.

Yeah, that'd probably be more correct. (?)

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com