Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

On 09/29/2012 10:31 AM, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:02:38 -0700 Kat Walsh wrote:
> > Copyright notices:
> >
> > One open question is whether to preserve copyright notices.
>
> I think that preserving copyright notices should be required, in order
> to help bringing clarity on who are the copyright holders for the work.

Yes I agree. I think that preserving notices is vital.

> [...]
> > 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!

Do note the "reasonable" requirement.

Requiring a change record is common in Free Software projects. With 
cultural works it would help avoid mis-attribution of work. For example 
if I modify a political tract and state:
"2012-08-29 Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org> - changed all occurrences of 
'shall' to 'shall not' in the body text".

But on balance, I do worry that the accuracy and completeness of such 
change records will be very variable, and that maintaining a simple list 
of the authors and dates of changes is still the best approach for 
indicating who has changed a work over time.

- Rob.