Development of Creative Commons licenses

[David Chart <bydosa AT davidchart.com>]

On 2012/01/06, at 5:11, Sarah Pearson wrote:

> The way the licenses currently work, the question of what constitutes a 
> derivative/adaptation is determined by reference to local law. 

Which is, as you certainly know, a horrible, unclear mess in most 
jurisdictions. And, as other people have pointed out, "local law" is often 
not well-defined. (Even for me personally: I'm a UK citizen, legally and 
physically resident in Japan, with a website served from the USA. Local law 
is...?)

It might be a good idea to have an "avoidance of doubt" list that says what 
is and isn't a derivative work, although the list would have to be developed 
over time.

An idea might be to have a set of classes of changed works.

Class A would be changes of file format or equivalent, things that are really 
not changes as far as the work itself is concerned, but only for its binary 
representation.

Class B would be proofreading, spelling correction, straight translation, 
playing something as a soundtrack (unchanged), putting a picture in a book, 
greyscaling, colorising, and so on. Things that do change the work, but leave 
it the same work.

Class C would be full-on transformations.

Then the licenses could specify which classes of changes were permitted: none 
(must preserve binary equivalence), or any combination of the others. This 
would effectively permit BY-DO-SA, if you only permitted Class C, and 
released the work in physical form.

-- 
David Chart
http://www.davidchart.com/Blog/