Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gregor Hagedorn <g.m.hagedorn AT gmail.com>]

Some comments:

1. Stability of copyright notices:

a) In my experience, the Copyright notice is often used to preserve an attribution to an organisation as well as the individual authors. This is desirable even in cases where the nominal copyright lies exclusively with the authors rather than the organisation. Removing a stable way to preserve such a link may lead to a situation where increasingly organisation require copyright transfer, because it may then be the only way to preserve attribution to the organisation.

b) Related: A "customary attribution" is often insufficient to disambiguate between authors. For example, "(c) J. Smith" may be a customary form below an image. "(c) J. Smith, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 2012" provides both organisational attribution and a disambiguation.

I consider a requirement for stability of copyright notices desirable, even if occasionally abused. The re-user of a work is free to choose whether to accept an usual copyright notice or whether to avoid the work.

However, where a derived-work-internal reference to another place is possible, I consider it desirable to allow to reproduction of the full copyright notice in a different place of the work, allowing for only an abbreviated form in some place (e.g. an image caption).

2. Stability of source attribution

"You may satisfy the conditions [..] in any reasonable manner based on

the medium, means, and context":

 

(This may mean, for example, that placing the attribution in a
particular place or splitting up the information in a particular way
is an acceptable way of complying with the requirements for your use,
even where it would not be in another context.)

I believe that CC should encourage stability in source and attribution citation. I would encourage that the reference should be published and maintained together with the work. That is, if copyright notice citation or creator or source attribution are abbreviated in the place where a work is adapted, e.g. where an image is used as illustration and limited space in the image caption makes abbreviated attribution customary, the adaptor should be REQUIRED to keep the full combination as publicly available and as persistent as the new work incorporating or adapting a CC-licensed work.

Present customary publishing practices are for images in books to cite the author on a separate page at the end of the book, and provide all details in the internal files housed at the publishers office. CC licenses should neither endorse a practice where the details are not publicly available, nor should it endorse a practice of referring the attribution and copyright details to an external link which is not managed together with the adapted work.

Links to attribution details are different from the requirements of a URL to a source of the work, allowing this URL point to the best available source is reasonable.

3. Identifying changes to the work:

I believe this is important. In my practice a major fear that is preventing authors from releasing their work under CC is that it may be maladapted ("deproved" rather than improved), but still primarily attributed to the first authors's names.

2. What kind of description should be required: should a verbal

description be required, or is the ability to see and compare the
changes enough?

I think a verbal description is too old-fashioned and will cause severe problems in the application of CC licenses. For example, Wikipedia makes all changes discoverable through version comparison, but does not "describe" them. I propose to change the current proposal to:

"if You Share Adapted Material, You must indicate the
Licensed Material which was used and document all changes." 

In the  above, "document" may if necessary be qualified as "clearly document" or "transparently document".

3. Is this desirable to put in the license at all, or should it simply
be a best practice?

I think a documentation that changes occurred is an essential component of proper attribution and it has always been best practice. Making this a required and reliable part of the license is a major improvement.

Gregor Hagedorn

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Dr. G. Hagedorn
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