Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Chitu Okoli <Chitu.Okoli AT concordia.ca>]

I'm trying to understand the need of one-way GPL compatibility, and I'm 
having a hard time with the idea. I did carefully read Francesco Poli's past 
posts (mainly [1]), but his reasons are not clear. Could someone please give 
a clear, real-life case where incompatibility has been a problem? That would 
help me understand the real problem.

As I understand it, if the programmer of GPLd software wants to incorporate 
CC-BY-SA work, all the programmer has to do is to contact the licensor and 
ask for permission to incorporate the work and license it GPL. Since CC-BY-SA 
is not GPL, I believe it is necessary to make this explicit request, rather 
than making it automatic through a new CC v4 clause.

My primary concern is that I don't believe that all users of CC-BY-SA necessarily want their work reused in a license that is only one-way compatible with any license, whether GPL or any other. (For sure, I don't!) For example, suppose a musician M releases some music CC-BY-SA v4, which includes the suggested one-way explicit grant for GPL reuse. Suppose that a game developer D incorporates the music, along with some original music of her own, into a GPL video game. Suppose M likes the video game sound track, and wants to develop it further into something else. Since the sharing is only one way, M would not be able to use the new music from the game, even though his own music was a significant part of it. Does my example correctly reflect the idea of a "one-way explicit grant", or am I missing something? As I have described it, I object to licensing work CC-BY-SA with a clause that could result in the licensor being locked out of his or her own original licensed work (even if it is 
through a free software license like the GPL).

In contrast, I think two-way compatibility would be reasonable and compatible 
with the intention of CC-BY-SA: If I license my work CC-BY-SA v4, then if I 
know that I can then automatically incorporate GPL v3.1 works, I would be 
glad to allow people automatically reuse my work in GPL v3.1, since this 
would enlarge the commons, rather than locking me out of improvements of my 
own work. However, if CC-BY-SA v4 included only a one-way explicit grant, 
then I would license my work CC-BY-SA v3, and I suspect many others who 
understand the issues would do the same.

I would appreciate comments on these thoughts, especially to clarify me if I 
am misunderstanding the issues involved.

References
[1] https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2011-December/006512.html

Regards,

Chitu Okoli
Associate Professor in Information Systems
John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montréal

Professeur invité dans technologies d'information
HEC Montréal, 2012 à 2013

http://chitu.okoli.org/pro


-------- Message original --------
Sujet: Re: [cc-licenses] by-nc-sa draft and GPL compatibility of by-sa
De : Francesco Poli <invernomuto AT paranoici.org>
Pour : cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
Date : 16 Juin 2012 03:29:22

On Fri, 08 Jun 2012 19:52:49 +0200 Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

[...]
To me,
GPL-compatibility is the most important new option of by-sa 4.0,
because if it gets realized, we get rid of the arbitrary split inside
copyleft free culture enforced by legal details.
[...]

As I have already repeatedly stated in the past, I think that having
one-way GPL-compatibility for CC-by-sa-v4.0 is of paramount importance.
I am happy to see that I am not the only one who still thinks so.

For more details, see:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2012-April/006732.html