Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber AT creativecommons.org>]

Hi all, (and sorry for the delayed reply; things have been busy and it
took a bit to construct this response),

Diane Peters and I had a call last Tuesday regarding this thread and
its associated issue.  We both agree that the conversation on this
list has been stellar, exactly the kind of discussion we'd like to see
around 4.0.  Unfortunately, upon further conversation, I think we both
agree that it doesn't seem that source requirements in CC BY-SA 4.0
are very feasible.  I think there are some good things that could come
out of this though, so please continue reading.

First of all, we both agree that there have been a lot of very strong
points on this thread.  All points about free cultural works lacking
or not reciprocating useful source (for exampe the described textbooks
released as PDF-only) are correct; this is a problem, and we should be
doing more to encourage awareness around the issue.  There have also
been some good replies in the conversations around how to define
source by taking a malleable approach, including suggestions around
"require release of what the author making the derivative used to
produce said work" when discussing the GIMP, Blender and et cetera
examples.

It's clear people want an option for source requirement, and to
increase awareness around the importance of source in free cultural
works.  And as Mike Linksvayer said, "For better or worse license
conditions are a central way people/communities express their
desires."  And so we understand well why people want source
requirements in the scope of the legalcode (or even in a
preamble... more on that below).

But to immediately re-quote Mike, "Adding a source requirement to any
of the existing CC licenses in my view would change their spirit
considerably and is probably not appropriate."  This is true
generally, and there are potentially more specific problems as well.
Amongst certain (particularly institutional) groups, adoption of CC
licenses is already difficult.  In some ways this could be good as it
would be an opportunity for education, however keeping compliance easy
and feasible is also an important goal.

Along the lines of compliance we also get into issues of enforcement.
Bradley Kuhn, who probably does more GPL (or *any* copyleft)
compliance work than anyone, has an interesting write-up on this
subject in several places, including here:

  http://sfconservancy.org/blog/2012/feb/01/gpl-enforcement/

And a podcast here:

  http://faif.us/cast/2011/sep/13/0x18/

... I'm having trouble finding the quote, but either he, or Karen
Sandler (or maybe both) have made the comment in the past that
copyleft is only effective if you can actually enforce the license,
otherwise it can't hold real teeth.  Going back to the "what is
source?" conversation which occured on this list, some people
suggested that source requirement could work as in terms of "what is
the format you were working with when you were producing this
derivative?"  If you try to imagine this requirement moving into
actual enforcement, it's hard to imagine being able to press the issue
when the source requirement might be a .PNG in one case and a .XCF in
another.  And if that's true, there's potential that we could end up
weakening the strength of CC BY-SA by adding provisions that are
difficult to enforce.

To add one more negative to the list before I get on to the list of
positives, one suggestion was to not add source requirement to the
actual legalcode but to a preamble, which is in many ways a very neat
idea.  Unfortunately this is more complex than it may seem: we don't
presently have a preamble, and adding one for just this thing could
either be messy/awkward, or could create a slippery slope where a
whole mess of normative, political licensing bits could head into the
preamble.  If we end up doing a preamble at some point, we would need
to have a lot more careful discussion about it, and this doesn't seem
to be enough to do that now.

So this conversation has been great and illuminating, and I hope that
people don't feel like this is being shot down.  We do agree that
source release is important, and maybe there are some things we can
still do.

At the very least, since we agree that there has been a lot of good
discussion here, one thing we would *like* to do is document some of
the history of 4.0 and the conversations here.  We don't have specific
plans for this yet, but Diane and I have discussed about making that
part of the 4.0 process.  If we do, it would be good to document the
points raised here as well as why we came to the conclusion we did.
Perhaps this will help the conversation continue better in the future.

It's probably also true that we could encourage people who want source
requirements to be part of their license to use the GPL for that work.
Perhaps our work with one-way GPL compatibility can help prevent some
siloing of content along these lines as well.  (More on GPL
compatibility to come shortly, we hope.)

As for actually actionable things that we can do in the domain of CC
licenses to help encouraging publishing of source, there's something
we can probably do on the tooling side.  There is the possibility that
we could add a checkbox to the CC license chooser that's something
along the lines of:

 [X] Indicate that sharing source is normative for this work and
     derivatives

... obviously with much less terrible, jargon-y language than the
above.  This could result in the copy-pastable code containing both
text along the lines of "If making modifications, please distribute
corresponding source code." and some metadata that indicates this in
machine-readable form.  People clicking through to the deed could also
get a note about this, similar to how we do for other rdfa-scraped
licensing related metadata.  That would be non-binding, but would
probably help people become more aware about the issue of including
source with derivatives being important.

At any rate, one lesson to come out of this is that CC should become
more active in promoting publishing sources to CC licensed works.  I
am hoping in the future that we'll see this further reflected by CC's
communication.

More communication on this topic is welcome, but at this point, it's
probably a good idea that the thread move over to the cc-community
list.  Thanks everyone for your excellent participation!

Thanks all,
 - Christopher Allan Webber