Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Mon, 2007-27-08 at 12:02 -0700, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> > I still have
> > no idea how to "hack" the RDF part to state current and later versions
> > of the license.  The RDF design is very monolithic and never took that
> > into account, and I'm concerned of leaving it as it is.
> 
> You're not using the crappy embedded RDF/XML in comments, so this is not 
> a concern.  Not that RDF is monolithic or anything.

I don't think there's a way to say "or any later version" in RDF. I
think what you'd have to say is something like:
        
        For all X: if X is a license,
                      and X has the same license elements as Y,
                      and the author of X is the author of Y,
                      and the version number of X is greater than or
        equal
                      to the version number of Y,
                   then the work is also available under X.

That's probably more information than your RDF reader needs to know. I
think it's probably more than sufficient to just list the current
license version, and update that when the site license updates.

It's not like any RDF statement is exhaustive, anyways. Saying "this
work is available under the terms of this license" doesn't mean that
it's not available, or won't someday be available, under the terms of
another license, too.

> >>  Ivo, I've greatly regretted not using the "or any later version"
> language on Wikitravel, and I use it now on all other CC-licensed
> sites I have. I strongly recommend it to you and anyone else who's
> managing a large collection of open media with a single license.
> 
> This is presumably something that would go into a site's ToS or other 
> agreement, as it is not facilitated directly by the CC licenses (for 
> non-derivative works).  I have no idea how this should actually be 
> implemented (and IANAL, so any idea I did have would be bogus), but it 
> is an interesting question.

Here's the text from Vinismo's notice whenever you edit a page:

        All contributions to Vinismo must be licensed under the Creative
        Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada and any later version
        (see Project:Copyrights for details), with attribution to
        Vinismo. By clicking "Save" below, you acknowledge that you
        agree to the site license as well as the following:

In other words, by contributing you're multi-licensing the work, under
the current and all future such licenses. I think it's probably a
sufficient level of agreement, although I think there may be some value
to making it a checkbox for your first edit, and rejecting edits that
don't have the checkbox checked. It'd default to checked (or just be
left out) after you'd done it once.

There may be some validity to a claim that one can't reasonably agree to
a license that does not yet exist, but I think there's a counterargument
that the versions of CC licenses are sufficiently similar, and have been
refined rather than radically changed, so that the licensor should have
a good general idea of what the terms of by-sa Canada 15.3 will be if
such a beast every actually exists.

-Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou - evan AT prodromou.name - http://evan.prodromou.name/

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