Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gregor Hagedorn <g.m.hagedorn AT gmail.com>]

> It would be interesting for some organization that will credibly be
> around for some time to maintain a site that registers and tracks such
> commitments.

Not requiring that is actually the essence of my proposal.
Yes, people could come back to an image after ten years and release
copyright on it, or re-license it. The problem is, this will typically
not happen, certainly not on individual images, and not by people or
organisations with hard commitments to write the next publication
rather than curating old one (which applies both to news agencies and
scientific work).

A good example is GenBank: everyone agrees that sequences need to
curated, and that it is a pain that so many sequences are just plain
wrong. But very few scientist do take the time to curate the new
knowledge gained since submitting the sequence to GenBank.

And yes, one could build a database where on the time of licensing
such information is kept. However, without reliable globally unique
IDs of copyrighted works, this is difficult to implement, and in any
case a costly overhead.

My idea is by making the end-date part of the licensing process as
well as of the license which must remain attached to the work anyways,
we can build this into the license chooser and guarantee its
attachment to the work. A CC BY-NC2012-SA license will be very easily
interpreted such that the NC license condition only applies untile the
end of the year 2012. Starting from 2013 the license will be
compatible with and relicensable as CC BY-SA by everyone.

I personally believe this is a singular dimension of complexity, well
poised to solve the problem of immediate protection, rather than
adding overall complexity or incompatibility issues to CC licensing
(which "new" licenses would do).

Gregor