Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Kat Walsh <kat AT creativecommons.org>]

One issue raised by affiliates during the 4.0 process is whether the deed and the legal code should be integrated onto one page. After considering the suggestion, we do not plan to do this right now.

The main reason would be to increase the chance that a user seeing the license conditions on the deed also sees the legal code. We would like to encourage this in general, and it could improve enforceability in many jurisdictions. However, due to the way the licenses are currently maintained, it would be difficult to do this reasonably. The license pages currently contain both legal code and non-legal code elements all together in the HTML document. Unless we were to split out the legal code from the rest of the HTML, the options for display still require the deed and legal code to be treated separately and are difficult to display together.

Relatedly, we now have a wiki page about the legal code, explaining what is and is not legal code, and how CC maintains it: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Legal_code

Though we are not taking this suggestion now, in the future we may consider maintaining the legal code separately from the other elements of the page, so that it may be manipulated and displayed on its own without introducing errors. (Those subscribed to cc-devel will have seen this thought already. [1]) However, we're not planning to focus on this before launch. We may revisit this decision if that happens; if we do, of course, we remain committed to the idea that all URLs CC has published for its licenses should remain valid.

[1]: https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-devel/2013-April/001767.html

-Kat

--

Kat Walsh, Counsel, Creative Commons
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California Registered In-House Counsel #801759
CC does not and cannot give legal advice. If you need legal advice, please consult your attorney.