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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Francesco Poli <invernomuto AT paranoici.org>
  • To: cc-licenses <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [cc-licenses] Compatibility: please do not use an external list of compatible licenses
  • Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2012 17:01:49 +0200

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.


--
http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt
New GnuPG key, see the transition document!
..................................................... Francesco Poli .
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