Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Mike Linksvayer" <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

CC0[http://creativecommons.org/projects/cczero] is a Creative Commons
project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling
authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to
communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which
any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work,
in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion.

As announced[http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7920] on CC's
5th anniversary, today we are announcing a beta of the CC0 user
interface[http://labs.creativecommons.org/license/zero] and technical
specification[http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCZero_Technical_Overview]
and discussion drafts of the CC0 legal tools:

The CC0
Waiver[http://labs.creativecommons.org/licenses/zero-waive/1.0/us/]
will enable the author or owner of a work to affirm the copyright and
related or neighboring legal rights that he or she has in a work, and
then to fully, permanently and irrevocably waive those rights. By making
this waiver, the Affirmer effectively dedicates all copyright or related
legal interests he or she held in the work to the public domain – "no
rights reserved". The CC0 Waiver (United States) will be an effective
legal tool within the US and any other jurisdictions with equivalent
law. It also will also be offered as a template indicating the scope
of most of the rights that must be covered in other jurisdictions in
order to effect an equivalent dedication to the public domain. Some
jurisdictions may need to address additional rights, for example "sui
generis" database rights and specific rights to data.

The CC0
Assertion[http://labs.creativecommons.org/licenses/zero-assert/1.0/us/]
will provide a means by which any person may assert that there are no
copyrights in a work, within a system that permits others to judge the
reliability of the assertion, based on the Asserter's identity and other
information the Asserter may provide. The CC0 Assertion (United States)
is intended to address copyright status under US law. The Assertion may
not be appropriate for Works created in or whose copyright status is
governed by the law of other jurisdictions.

Internationalization

As with our existing core legal tools (six licenses ranging from
Attribution to Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives), we want the CC0
waiver and assertion legal tools to be valid worldwide and eventually
ported to many jurisdictions worldwide to take into account the nuances
of copyright law in those jurisdictions. Our strategy and schedule for
accomplishing these goals will be based on feedback from our international
project[http://creativecommons.org/international] jurisdiction leads,
who are responsible for the same process for our existing tools.

Norms

One of the use cases for CC0 is the Protocol for Implementing Open Access
Data[http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/],
also
announced[http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/12/16/announcing-protocol-for-oa-data/]
in conjunction with CC's 5th birthday. In addition to fulfilling the
protocol's legal requirements, the CC0 technical infrastructure will also
support the assertion of non-legal community norms in conjunction with
a work, beginning with the norm of citation in the context of science.

Discussion

Feedback on the legal tools should be directed to the cc-licenses
mailing list. Only subscribers may post and the list is moderated
so that off-topic posts do not burden subscribers. To join go to
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses

Similarly, technology feedback should be directed to
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel

General comments may be directed to
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-community

These discussions will be summarized at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCZero_Feedback

Deployment

The CC0 beta and drafts referenced above are only intended to be used for
testing and feedback. The beta/discussion period will last a minimum of
one month and most likely include several incremental betas and drafts,
depending on community feedback.

If your organization plans significant support for CC0 upon its release
for production use, please contact press AT creativecommons.org concerning
potential coordination.