Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Kat Walsh <kat AT creativecommons.org>]

Responses inline.

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab AT web.de> 
wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 28. Februar 2013, 11:40:24 schrieb Kat Walsh:
>> Any such license that
>> would be considered would have to have all of the same requirements as
>> BY-SA, but would also contain some additional requirements that BY-SA
>> did not.
>
> I think this is the most important point here: For this scheme to work, the 
> restrictions on cc by-sa must be a clear subset of other copyleft licenses, 
> because those won’t allow adding additional restrictions.
>
> So the drafting of cc by-sa already takes a clear decision which licenses 
> might be seen as compatible in future.

I think this is true, yes--and I also think it's the policy choice
that best respects the intentions of licensors.

(I think you are agreeing with the previous summary here, but to
clarify this just in case: everything that's included within the text
of the CC licenses is intended to have a purpose. If you as a licensor
wish to apply a CC license to your work, but you don't care very much
about certain conditions, you are of course always free to waive them,
or to dual-license under whatever other terms you want. But we can't
make the assumption for you about which terms you do and don't care
about by allowing others not to respect them--if we at CC wanted to
make them optional, we wouldn't have included them in the license.)

> This could only be avoided, if the requirement would be dropped, that the 
> unmodified source should always be cc by-sa: Otherwise, if the combined 
> work were available under another license, people would not be allowed to 
> strip away all the new stuff and use the result under the same license, 
> which is a restriction on changing the resulting work that might not be 
> compatible with the other license (that’s why one-way compatibility is 
> needed in the first place, after all: the terms of the other license and 
> by-sa aren’t completely compatible).
>
> I think that this won’t often happen in practise, because if the license is 
> written inside a given file, then editing the file might be considered 
> implicit acceptance of the license, if the copyright header is not 
> explicitely changed while editing (and changed would mean to specify on a 
> line-by-line or even character-by-character base which license applies to 
> which part…).

The way we are thinking about this, the original work must always be
subject to the terms of BY-SA, as those are the terms the licensor
agreed to--no compatibility mechanism we are thinking about would
actually relicense the original work. Having a list of compatible
licenses would simply say which licenses qualify as "alike" for the
purposes of adaptations being Shared Alike.

However, if you stripped away the new material from an adaptation of a
SA work, you would always be able to take that BY-SA original work and
create something new from it under that compatible license (or any
compatible license).

We might encourage licensors to waive terms they are not interested in
enforcing, or to dual-license their work where appropriate.
Practically, many licensors aren't interested enough in licensing to
know that they would want this; I wouldn't expect more than a small
fraction of licensors to do it. However, it is an alternative to
relicensing works.

(I'm not certain I understood you correctly here, though--let me know
if I answered the wrong question.)

>> 1. Is one-way compatibility with BY-SA worth having a full
>> conversation on in the near future? (We would expect this to be a
>> discussion that did not have to finish before the 4.0 process
>> concluded: the text in the current draft of 4.0 does not prescribe
>> either decision.)
>
> For me the missing one-way compatibility is the one major obstacle to using 
> cc by-sa. As long as I cannot use cc by-sa works together with GPL works, I 
> see no way into the future for cc by-sa. If I were to license something 
> under cc by-sa and someone else would contribute, I would no longer be able 
> to use it together with works which require the stronger protections of the 
> (A)GPL to have a meaningful copyleft.
>
> Since I also program and write in markup which gets processed to opaque 
> documents, protection of the freedom of the source is an important 
> requirement for some of my works.

Thanks for your comments on this.

-Kat

-- 
Kat Walsh, Counsel, Creative Commons
IM/IRC/@/etc: mindspillage * phone: please email first
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