Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Francesco Poli <invernomuto AT paranoici.org>]

Hi everybody,
Section 1(d) of CC-by-sa-v4.0draft2 states:

[...]
>  (d) Creative Commons Compatible License means a license that is listed
>      at http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses and has been
>      approved by Creative Commons as being essentially the equivalent
>      of this Public License, including, at a minimum, because that
>      license: (i) contains terms that have the same purpose, meaning
>      and effect as the License Elements of this Public License; and
>      (ii) explicitly permits the licensing of adaptations of works made
>      available under that license under this Public License.
[...]

It's worth noting that this list of Compatible Licenses can change in
time, even after an author has licensed his/her work under the CC-by-sa
license.  This mechanism may effectively modify the permissions granted
by that author *after* he/she licensed his/her work, independently of
his/her will: Creative Commons can decide that some other license L is
"equivalent" to CC-by-sa and thus allow the distribution (see the
relevant clause later on) of Adaptations of CC-by-sa licensed works
under the terms of L, even if the author of the original CC-by-sa
licensed work does not like license L.

Maybe the original author does not agree with Creative Commons that
license L is "equivalent" to CC-by-sa, but there's nothing he/she can
do to stop the re-licensing of Adaptations of his/her CC-by-sa licensed
works.  This mechanism greatly weakens the copyleft of the CC-by-sa
(assuming that CC-by-sa is intended to be a copyleft license).

I think that this mechanism should not be implemented: when I decide
that I want a copyleft license, I don't want that adaptations can be
re-licensed under yet unknown terms.  Licenses that are declared
compatible with a given version of a license should be known upfront
and not change in time.

I hope this suggestion may be followed in the next draft.


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