Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Parker Higgins <parkerhiggins AT gmail.com>]

There is a change in d4 to the ShareAlike clause that as I read it, allows downstream users to refer only to the "Adapter's license," and not the sum of licenses for the works in the Adapted Material. In practice all such licenses are likely to be similar or identical, with the only difference being that the Adapter may be using a later version (or, if I'm reading correctly, a Compatible License).

This seems like a sensible change to me; I agree with CC's evaluation that such a change should be uncontroversial. The only point of possible controversy I see stems from Francesco Poli's line of inquiry about compatible licenses: say CC is somehow less than fully diligent about selecting or vetting Compatible Licenses, and the Adapter's license is one of these inadequate choices from this list.

Even in that (extraordinary) case, though, that's not a burden for this license to carry. All that would mean is that further downstream users may or may not be able to avail themselves of this reasonable clause, depending on its inclusion in the Compatible License, and may have to parse more than one license.

Good idea, well executed, as far as I can tell.

Thanks,

Parker

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parker higgins
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http://parkerhiggins.net

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