Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Anthony <osm AT inbox.org>]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 5:31 AM, Francesco Poli
<invernomuto AT paranoici.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:02:38 -0700 Kat Walsh wrote:
>> Identifying changes to the work:
>>
>> This one does not appear in 4.0d2--it is a new suggestion in the
>> current internal draft, and something we'd like to hear community
>> opinion on: "if You Share Adapted Material, You must indicate the
>> Licensed Material was used and describe the changes made." (This would
>> also be "reasonable to the medium, means, and context", as the other
>> attribution information would be.)
>
> I think that this should be *much* narrower, or otherwise compliance
> would become a nightmare!

This is the huge elephant in the room.  Traditionally, massively
collaborative works like Wikipedia and OSM have interpreted every
single edit as creating a derivative work.  (Or, perhaps, every single
significant edit, which really only serves to confuse the issue
further.)

I think this is a problem for WMF and OSMF and the others to solve,
and can't really be solved by the license.  OSMF has worked toward a
solution with its new contributor terms, which assign rights to the
organization and allow the organization to sub-license the work to
others.  (Unfortunately, they are no longer using CC.)  FSF, in the
software realm, has solved the problem even more drastically, by
requiring copyright assignment.

Anyway, in the case of derivative works (as opposed to collaborative
works which are licensed by a single entity), there is an important
advantage of requiring identification of changes besides attribution.
It allows re-users to be able to find out, at least in theory, who the
author is of the part of the work you want to reuse, if you only want
to reuse part of it.  You might want to find out the original author
in order to ask for special permissions.  Or you might just want to
find out who it is so that you can verify the chain of title.