Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Hi

>> 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.
>
> The FSF, CC, EFF and the people behind the FAL would appear to
> disagree with you. So would most of the copyright cabal on wikipedia
> but they are more used to dealing with people who are impossible to
> trace and/or dead.

I know the FSF's position, but the CC is not forced to follow FSF
ideology. I, in fact, hesitate to release code under GNU GPL partly
because such a release would imply my trust in all future versions of
GPL.

The CC could equally well be considered to agree with me since it seem
both texts have been used.

>> 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.
>
> Doubtful. It is unlikely that the courts would uphold a license that
> went against the intentions of the original.

IANAL, but if the license allow relicensing under future versions and
a future version does not comply with some implicit intension I would
not hold it for granted that a court would disqualify the later
version. Stricly speaking you have permitted redistribution under
_any_ future version whether or not it comply with the original
intension. In any case, the intension is not an acctually part of the
license text.

>> 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.
>
> They are free to write yet another messy homebrew license. Licenses
> left unmaintained tend to become progressively more problematical over
> time.

One could just as well argue that any licensor who doesn't care about
his/her own rights to the work place it in the public domain or write
their own messy homebrew license.

>
>> 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"
>
> This rapidly results in what is best described as a horrific mess.
> License compatibility issues are always a problem. I see no reason to
> add to them.

Why would it be a mess?
A wiki or community that wants to always use the latest version can
just request all contributors to accept that their contributions can
be released under the present or any future version of CC.

>> 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.
>
> There are ways people can force an exact version if they really want to.

Again, IANAL, but I don't think it is possible to force an exact
version of the license if the license text itself give away the right
to use different licenses. To do that, one would have to restrict the
rights granted by the license in which case it would no longer be a CC
license. Creating a license that look like a CC but isn't would likely
be a trademark infringement (assuming CC is a trademark).

The way I see it, it is easy for any licensor to allow the use of
future licenses, but it would be very difficult if not impossible for
the licensor to prohibit the use of a particular future license if he
has already given away the right to use any future version. That is
why I think that it would be better not to give away a general right
to use future licenses.

Regards
Bjorn