Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Björn Terelius <bjorn.terelius AT gmail.com>]

Geni wrote:

> > Hi
> >
> > I would prefer not allowing redistribution of the work under later
> > versions of the license, as there is no *guatantee* that the later
> > versions will preserve the original intention.
> >     
>
>
> It is required to update the licenses in order to deal with changes in
> the law and technology.
>   
A license or parts of it may be deemed unenforcable or invalid in which
case that part will be considered void, but i know of no jurisdiction
that *requires* the license authors to release a new version of the license.
Whether or not a new license is released, the work will still be licensed
under the unenforcable license.

In practice, it is certainly neccesary to update licenses from time to
time, but I consider it the creator/maintainers responsibilty to apply
the new license to the work. Automatically applying a later version of
the license can never help protecting the licensors rights, since the
work is still released under the older, possibly flawed, license. It can,
however, harm the licensor if the new license is flawed but the old wasn't.

By allowing the use of any later CC-license, one actually gives away the
complete rights to the work to the CC-license authors, as the authors could
in principle change any terms of the license text as they see fit.

Again, while *I* trust the CC authors, I can easily think of people who would
not want to rely on the honesty of the CC community.


> Even without those it is extremely desirable to do so to deal with
> issues not originally thought of and flaws discovered after the
> license has been released.
>
>   
As stated above, no such improvements will benefit the licensor.

If the licensor do trust the CC-community and wish to let the licensee
choose which CC-version to use, I think he or she should say so
explicitly by writing somthing like:
"CC BY-SA 2.5 or (at your option) any later version"
By handling updates in this way one allows the licensor to either decide
the exact version or let the licensee make that decision, without
mentioning the different licenses in the license agreement.


Best regards
Bjorn Terelius