Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

General Points
==============

* I agree with Luis, the new license looks great. It is very easy to read.



* I am concerned about the various explicit statements that the license 
makes about not covering other rights (especially patents) in the light 
of OSI's discussion of CC0:

http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-February/000231.html

It may be best simply to mention model releases.



* I am concerned about the scope of ShareAlike, as indicated by my notes 
on 1.d below. Both from the point of view being a strong proponent of 
copyleft, and from the point of view of practicality.





Specific Points
===============

* Preamble:"To the extent this Public License may be considered a contract,"

I assume this careful phrasing will avoid the license being considered a 
contract in the US:

http://lwn.net/Articles/61292/



* Preamble: "This Public License does not affect third party rights in 
the Licensed Work."

What does this mean? How could the license affect third party rights?



* Preamble: "Additionally, You are responsible for complying with other 
laws that may apply"

I assume that this doesn't fall foul of the same problem as the UK OGL, 
which mentions *specific* *national* laws:

http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2011-October/000064.html



* 1.d: "The Licensed Work may be accompanied by or integrated with other 
work, content or material not covered by this Public License, such as 
public domain content or works owned by third parties."

What does "accompanied" mean?

What does "integrated" mean?

Is "may be" a warning or a grant of permission?

On the one hand this makes clear that reblogging or critiquing ARR work 
in a CC context isn't an attempt to CC license it. Which is good.

On the other, it does make it clear that BY-SA is a *very* weak 
copyleft, going further than the FDL and more akin to the Open Gaming 
License in its ability to interleave non-free material. Which may be bad.

If BY-SA is very weak copyleft and may accompany ARR work, what does 
this mean for "stronger copyleft", as per Drew, Wikipedia and the FSF?

And how would this affect GPL compatibility?



* 2.a.3: "where the Licensed Work is a database, in addition to the 
above, extract and reuse contents of the Licensed Work"

This creates an incompatible copyleft with the ODbL. At present, ODbL 
data may be used to produce BY-SA works.



* 2.b.1 "To the extent possible and necessary to allow You to reasonably 
exercise the rights granted to You under this Public License, Licensor 
waives or, where not permissible, agrees not to assert:

(i) Licensor’s moral rights in the Licensed Work; however, Licensor 
retains all other moral rights Licensor has in the Licensed Work; and"

I like this.

Is the fact that it creates an uneven standard internationally, where 
previous versions harmonized things more, a problem or a valid response 
to moral rights as a limit on free culture?

What "other moral rights"? I can't parse the second part of (i).



* 3.a.1: "If You Share the Licensed Work or an Adaptation, You must 
provide, in any reasonable manner based on the medium or means You are 
using..."

Reasonable as defined by the licensor or by the licensee? Unreasonable 
licensor attribution demands have been a problem for Wikipedia iirc.



* 4.a, from the notes: "Removed from this draft the portion of 3.0 
Section 4(a) disallowing restrictions to be added to license (also 
removed from SA provision). These will be addressed in Additional Terms 
proposal in later 4.0 draft."

I would urge caution in allowing additional restrictions, and draw 
people's attention to the GPLv3's handling of them:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

"All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further 
restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you 
received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is 
governed by this License along with a term that is a further 
restriction, you may remove that term."



* 5.a "If You fail to comply with any conditions of this Public License, 
this Public License will terminate automatically"

Is it worth having a GPLv3-style compliance window?





- Rob.