Development of Creative Commons licenses

[tomislav medak <to-me AT mi2.hr>]

My experience in working with licensees is that the hardest thing for them to figure out in attribution is the formulation of license specific elements: copyright notice, license URI and notices, disclaimers, warranties referring to the CC license. Part of the problem is also that these elements are frequently longer than the name, title and URI of the work. Given that we are now including this list in the license, we should consider stating verbatim what these attribution elements for that specific license should read or listing the most typical examples. That will create a lot of clarity.

I'd also suggest trying to get rid of the URI acronym as it is not part of the everyday language and potentially some users might not know what it means. In greatest majority of cases URI will be a URL anyhow. Alternatively, if URL instead of URI is too narrow, the requirement could read: "United Resource Identifier associated with the work, such as URL, ISBN, ISSN, etc."

Tom

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 12:32 AM, Sarah Pearson <sarah AT creativecommons.org> wrote:

All -- We have some specific questions about attribution/marking in v.4, and we would love to get as much feedback as possible by the end of this month. The questions are posted on the 4.0 wiki here. I have also cut and pasted them below for those that would rather respond on the mailing list.

Note that we are also trying to solicit feedback from specific communities, such as OER and others, so we are circulating the questions on a few other mailing lists as well. We will do our best to consolidate all feedback on the 4.0 wiki as we receive it. 

Thanks for your input.
best,
Sarah

--------------------

In draft 1, we tried to simplify the attribution and marking requirements by putting them all into one section of the license in list form. This is designed to make it easier for licensees to understand and comply with their obligations.

Specifically, when sharing the work, licensees must provide the following information when it is supplied by licensor:

• Name of the author
• Name of parties designed by licensor for attribution
• Title of the work
• Copyright notice
• URI associated with the work
• URI associated with the CC license
• Notices, disclaimers, warranties referring to the CC license
  

(1) Is there any other information we should require licensees to provide when fulfilling the attribution and marking requirements under CC licenses? Alternatively, is there anything in this list that is unnecessary for licensees to provide even when it is supplied by the licensor? Our goal is to make the requirements extensive enough to satisfy licensors’ desire to be attributed and recognized for their work without making the obligations impractical. 

(2) All of these requirements may be fulfilled in any reasonable manner based on the medium the licensee is using to share the licensed work. This flexibility is intended to help ease compliance with the license conditions. Does the current language grant licensees too much flexibility? Not enough? Is there anything else we should change to make it easier on licensees that are remixing content from multiple sources – the so-called “attribution stacking” problem?

(3) If the URI associated with the work refers to a resource that specifies the name of the author (or attribution parties, if applicable) and title of the work, licensees may include only the URI rather than specifying that information separately. This is another attempt to make compliance with the license conditions easier and more flexible without compromising the needs and expectations of licensors. Is this shortcut appropriate and/or helpful? If the URI points to a resource that includes the other required information (e.g., the copyright notice), would it be preferable to allow the URI shortcut to satisfy those other requirements as well?

(4) Some licensors have more detailed expectations for attribution of their work. Should we make allowances for licensors who want to include specific attribution requirements (e.g., a particular attribution statement), or would this unnecessarily complicate license compliance? Note that any particular requirements would need to be subject to the reasonableness standard to be consistent with the explicit terms of the license.

(5) Another possibility is to change the language to a more general requirement to acknowledge the author and cite the original work and applicable license. We could then include the current list of attribution and marking requirements as an example of best practices rather than as a specific legal requirement. This would potentially give licensees more freedom to adapt attribution to their particular circumstances, while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the requirements. Is this a proposal we should pursue? Why or why not?

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