Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Anthony <osm AT inbox.org>]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 4:07 AM, Paul Keller <pk AT kl.nl> wrote:
> So what i am mainly concerned here is works of joint authorship. This is 
> where i think that the clarified language introduces unwanted 
> uncertainties). To use a very simple example: You have an academic paper 
> written by three authors. Now it is published under a cc license on the 
> website of one of the authors. Looking at the license text i could get the 
> impression that there is one licensor who has published the paper under a 
> cc license and he may or may not have done so in with the expression of her 
> co-authors. At this point the license becomes meaningless as it does not 
> say:
>
> this paper can be used under the terms of creative commons license
>
> but rather says
>
> as far as the licensor is rights holder in this paper he gives permissions 
> to make use of the paper under the terms of the license. there may however 
> be other rights holders and it is up to you dear licensee to figure out if 
> they also allow you to use the paper under these conditions.
>
> the first statement is something that empowers me as a user. the second one 
> is one that does not.

---

Hmm, I never thought of it that way.  This isn't a problem in the
United States, where by default it only takes one joint author to
license a work.  But that's not the way it works in the UK, where all
joint authors have to agree to license a work.  That could be a major
problem for the functioning of Sharealike.