Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf AT gwolf.org>]

Hi Micaela,

Excuse me for replying so late, I've got quite a bit of catch-up to do
on my mails after the vacations.

Micaela Gallerini dijo [Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 08:01:12AM +0100]:
> (...)
> I've put a copyright license for my own reason and I want to remain so even
> if in the public domain. After all how many of us would change Plato or
> Aristotle? Can I write something that enhances their initial work from what
> they have written making it much, but change a piece of any of their
> writings for any other author would be an abomination.

As a little note (my main argument is to the following paragraph): A
certain number of years after our death (depending on the country), no
matter the licenses we put to our work, it will become public
domain. There's (fortunately!) nothing we can do about it as
individual authors. And I hope legislators don't allow for it to
change.

> Now, it is tru that not all authors will become newly Plato or Aristotle,
> but I think everyone has the same right to write whatever they want and has
> the same right as the rich and famous authors to be able to see his work
> run with the correct license and to remain so as he thought of it.
> At this point I can suggest one thing, instead of creating a license with
> an expiration date, you could create a public domain license of death (PUD,
> for my underwritten example naturally).
> In this way the author has no logistics problems of all his works and does
> not even have to create databases or files of any kind. It is known that
> the death of all that he wrote or produced, was also the day before his
> death, becomes public domain.
> You could combine with other licenses, for example, by-nc-PUD, or
> by-sa-PUD, etcetera, in this way, the author may select the license of his
> moral and the type of work that has created more suited to its needs
> withour frustrating for anyone.

You raise an interesting point, which I'll try to generalize: Allowing
for licenses to expire not just on a given time, but on a given
event. That event could be anything clearly verifiable from the
outside (such as the author's death, but not as somebody else
mentioned on the list, the author receiving a given amount of money).

As for the semantics, I favor what I've also seen in this thread,
specifying the condition next to its expiration -
i.e. BY-SA(PUD)-NC(2015) would mean that the work is noncommercial
until year 2015, share-alike while the author is alive, and requires
attribution as long as it's covered by copyright.