Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Francesco Poli <invernomuto AT paranoici.org>]

Hi all,
Section 3(a)(4) of CC-by-sa-v4.0draft2 includes the following part:

[...]
>      You must, to the extent reasonably practicable, remove the
>      information in (a)(1)(A) above if requested by Licensor.
[...]

where information in (a)(1)(A) is basically, the author's identity and
other the parties to be attributed.

I'm still not convinced that this clause meets the Debian Free Software
Guidelines. See my previous comment [1].

[1] https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2012-January/006602.html

Since I don't think that a license can (allow a licensor to) forbid an
accurate credit and meet the DFSG at the same time, I recommend that
this clause be dropped entirely from CC-v4.0 licenses, or, at least,
amended so that it says:

| You must, to the extent reasonably practicable, remove the
| information in (a)(1)(A) above if the information is inaccurate
| or misleading and the removal is requested by Licensor.

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

I believe that the current restriction is a high cost, since, while
preparing an adaptation, you may strive to do things right and to
comply with the license terms as thoroughly as you want, to only find
out *later* that the original Licensor believes that your attributing
to him/her the original Work hurts his/her reputation and must
therefore be removed.

Please note two important aspects:

  A) you are *forced* by the license to credit the original author,
hence you cannot preemptively omit the attribution just in case you
later receive a request to remove it

  B) there's no way to predict in advance whether the original Licensor
will *arbitrarily* consider your adaptation harmful for his/her
reputation or anyway dislike (for whatever reason!) that his/her name
is mentioned (even just as author of the original work) in your
adaptation; the clause does *not* require any justification from the
Licensor for his/her request to remove the attribution, nor any
condition to be satisfied in order for the Licensor to be able to make
such a request: you just have to comply, no matter what, *simply*
because the Licensor requested to do so *after* your adaptation is
already in the wild

When the request arrives, you have to go back to your adaptation and
modify it, no matter how much spare time you may have to do so.  And
there's absolutely nothing you can do before releasing your adaptation
in order to prevent this inconvenience from happening.


-- 
 http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt
 New GnuPG key, see the transition document!
..................................................... Francesco Poli .
 GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82  3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE

Attachment: pgpgpyO_dYKne.pgp
Description: PGP signature