Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Luis Villa <luis AT tieguy.org>]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Andrew Harvey <andrew.harvey4 AT gmail.com> 
wrote:
> On 29/09/12 14:02, 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.)
>>
>> This appears in several other free licenses, and helps distinguish the
>> contributions of each authors or group of authors. For example, a
>> translation might bear the note "translated into Spanish by X".
>> However, we also see it potentially presents problems in complying.
>>
>> There are a few specific questions we'd really like to hear answers to:
>>
>> 1. What existing uses of the licenses would this break or make
>> extremely difficult, and how could it be improved?
>> 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 don't see this as being practical. If I'm working on remixing an
> artistic work am I expected to record every change I make? eg. changed
> colour levels, applied Gaussian blur, etc.
>
> That would become impractical, let along being ambiguous in the actual
> requirement ie. which level of detail describing changes is enough for
> compliance: "edited the original image", "applied Gaussian blur",
> "applied Gaussian blur with settings of omega=0.246?

I'd add that in practice these requirements are completely ignored in
the wild in the software world, even when they are very mild. e.g.,
Apache and GPL only require notice that the material has been changed,
rather than any information about the nature of the change, and yet
that is only rarely complied with.

Luis