Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Jessica Coates wrote:
> Also - it's been pointed out that our proposed language for how you
> can distribute the original work (ie under the same CC licence, a
> later version, or the same licence from another jurisdiction)
> actually goes much further than the Unported text, which just says:
> 
> "You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms
> of this License."

Yes, it's a subtle point, but the unported license only allows
*derivatives* to be licensed under newer versions.

> What do people think? Should we roll our language back in line with
> the Unported, or is the forward and cross-jurisdiction compatibility
> implied/a good thing?

The trust issue has already been brought up. In light of that problem,
AFAIK, there are very few genuine use-cases for the need to relicense
original works (as opposed to material incorporated into derivatives).

The use-case for updating licensing on derived works is really
important: it allows someone reprocessing and combining works into new
works (arguably the whole purpose of using CC licenses in the first
place) to treat each CC license type (By, By-SA, By-NC-SA, etc) as a
single unit, without worrying about jurisdictions and versions. One only
has to use the most recent version, and all the problems will wash out.

But so far, the only times you actually need to relicense the original
work are cases where there is a serious problem in the earlier license
so that you can no longer distribute the work, and for wikis, where
there is some ambiguity between what constitutes a "Collection" and what
is a single work as well as a difficulty in marking (i.e. you can't just
mark the whole wiki as upgraded to a new license (Or can you? It depends
on whether a wiki site is a "work" or a "collection" of works)). In both
cases, the impact isn't that severe (you can work around the wiki
problem, and the distribution problem is mostly an issue for By-SA
licensing only -- e.g. if you want to make Debian or somebody happy --
and that can be solved by asking the author to update the license, or
alternatively, making a statement explicitly allowing relicensing, as is
common with the GPL).

Summarizing:

* Some people deeply distrust relicensing authority invested in CC
* The most important use case is covered by the unported version
* The few cases for original work relicensing have work-arounds

So, while I'm not Australian, so this will probably have no effect on me
personally, I'm inclined to suggest that it would serve your purpose
better to roll the language back to agree with the unported version.

Cheers,
Terry

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