Development of Creative Commons licenses

[adam <adam AT xs4all.nl>]

Great explanation. Many thanks for the careful consideration and 
suggestions for forward movement.

My only comment is that encouraging people to use the GPL for 
non-software works is a losing battle (speaking from 5 years of 
experience trying to do this). I would encourage CC to focus more on 
raising awareness of the value of source as you have suggested and not 
emphasize pushing the issue towards the GPL.

Other than that I think a check box as you have described would be an 
excellent start. Actually I think its a significant start and it would 
be fantastic to see this as a concrete outcome out of this process.

adam

On 17/04/12 19:38, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
> 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
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