Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Francesco Poli <invernomuto AT paranoici.org>]

Hello to everyone,
Section 1(d) of CC-by-sa-v4.0draft3 states:

[...]
>  d. Creative Commons Compatible License means a license listed at
>     http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses and approved by
>     Creative Commons as essentially the equivalent of this Public
>     License.
[...]

It's worth noting that this list of Compatible Licenses can change in
time, even after an author has licensed his/her work under the CC-by-sa
license.  This mechanism may effectively modify the permissions granted
by that author *after* he/she licensed his/her work, independently of
his/her will: Creative Commons can decide that some other license L is
"equivalent" to CC-by-sa and thus allow the distribution (see the
relevant clause later on) of Adapted Material of CC-by-sa licensed works
under the terms of L, even if the author of the original CC-by-sa
licensed work does not like license L.

Maybe the original author does not agree with Creative Commons that
license L is "equivalent" to CC-by-sa, but there's nothing he/she can
do to stop the re-licensing of Adapted Material of his/her CC-by-sa
licensed works.  This mechanism greatly weakens the copyleft of the
CC-by-sa (assuming that CC-by-sa is intended to be a copyleft license).

I think that this mechanism should not be implemented: when I decide
that I want a copyleft license, I don't want that adapted material can
be re-licensed under yet unknown terms.  Licenses that are declared
compatible with a given version of a license should be known upfront
and not change in time.

Instead, I reiterate the recommendation to introduce an explicit
one-way conversion clause that allows redistribution of
CC-by-sa-v4.0-licensed works under the terms of the GNU
GPL version 2 or any later version.

Moreover, no compatibility mechanism seems to be implemented
in the draft3 of CC-by-v4.0.

Once again, I strongly recommend to introduce an explicit one-way
conversion clause that allows redistribution of CC-by-v4.0-licensed
works under the terms of the zlib license:
http://www.gzip.org/zlib/zlib_license.html

See my previous messages [1][2] about the same issues in draft2.

[1] https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2012-August/007114.html
[2] https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2012-August/007140.html

I hope these suggestions may be followed in the next draft.


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