Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Lawrence Lessig" <larry AT creativecommons.org>]

Last week the Wikimedia Foundation board took an important step[1]
toward giving Wikipedia the right to choose to migrate to a Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.  Credit goes to the Wikimedia
Foundation and Free Software Foundation for having the wisdom and
foresight to enable this progress.

However, the real work has just begun. As Wikipedia founder Jimmy
Wales put it[2]:

        Now, community, we have a lot to talk about. :)

For Creative Commons, this means continuing[3] a discussion concerning
how the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license can be improved so as to not
only be the best available license for a massively collaborative
content project, but the best such license feasible.

To start with, Wikimedia board member Erik Moeller has posted[4] a
list of issues that we want to address -- with input from across the
CC community.

One of these issues holds particular interest: Should the ShareAlike
requirement be more precisely defined for "embedded" media, and if so,
how? For example, if an image licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike is
used to illustrate an article, must the article be similarly licensed?
This has previously been discussed[5] on the cc-licenses list, and we
welcome the opportunity to drive that discussion to a happy
conclusion.

Tentatively the eventual outcome of these discussions will be a new
version of the CC licenses. We'll say version 3.5 for now -- a
significant improvement, but still within the framework of version
3.0[6] and folding in the work done so far on proposed version
3.01[7], thanks again to the Wikipedia community.

The primary venue for this discussion focused on improving CC licenses
is the cc-licenses list[8]. We encourage you to subscribe and
participate. Of course related discussion will and should continue on
Wikimedia and other lists.

Thanks again to the WMF and FSF, and thanks in advance to you, the
community, for the work that is ongoing and about to begin!


Lawrence Lessig
CEO
Creative Commons


[1] http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7876
[2] 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-December/035554.html
[3] http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7718
[4] 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-December/035677.html
[5] 
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2007-February/thread.html#5142
[6] http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Version_3
[7] http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Version_301
[8] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses