Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Francesco Poli <invernomuto AT paranoici.org>]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:39:21 -0400 drew Roberts wrote:

> On Monday 16 April 2012 13:02:51 Francesco Poli wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:09:42 -0400 drew Roberts wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > > I say make all parts of the aggregation Free. All parts to not have to 
> > > be
> > > copyleft or under the same copyleft license. Just under some acceptable
> > > (i.e. truly) Free license.
> >
> > I think this is really unworkable: what is a "truly Free license"?
> > For instance, I personally consider the GNU GPL v2 as a recommendable
> > license, while I consider the CC-by-sa-v3.0 as a non-free license.
> > Your opinions may significantly differ. The opinions of other people
> > will sure differ.
> >
> > The only way a copyleft mechanism may actually work is that, when it
> > kicks in, it mandates the adoption of the *same* license (or, at most,
> > a limited set of alternative licenses, if explicit conversion clauses
> > are in place).
> 
> I think your imagination is too limited.
> 
> A copyleft license could kick in one way for derivatives and that would be 
> the 
> copyleft bit.

It sure could, but it would be more complicated than usual, and please
remember that copyleft licenses are already significantly more
complicated than non-copyleft ones.

> 
> It could kick in another way, and with an obviously different trigger, for 
> non-derivative / non-adaptave uses that require copying for inclusion into 
> other copyrighted works.
> 
> It could require the same license when kicking in due to way one and just 
> just 
> Free siblings and parent when kicking in in way two.
> 
> In both instances, you may need to name all acceptable licenses or have 
> some 
> trusted group to name future additions to the list. In the first instance 
> the 
> list would be very restricted and limited to the license itself or truly 
> compatible copyleft licenses. In the second instance, the list would be 
> much 
> larger and would include Free copyleft and permissive licenses.

You are not saying something too different from what I said:
I acknowledged that a copyleft license could mandate the adoption of one
out of a limited set of alternative licenses.
Whether the list of alternative licenses is spelled out in the license
text (better) or maintained externally by a trusted group (dangerous,
licensors won't be able to know upfront which permissions they are
really granting, since the list of alternative licenses may change in
time in an unpredictable way...) is an implementation detail (an
important detail, but still...).


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