Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Federico Morando <federico.morando AT gmail.com>]

I hope this is not touching issues already discussed, but we (meaning the CC Italy working group) have a few questions/suggestions (not necessarily concerning the latest changes of draft 4).

The two relatively more "substantial" comments are:

- in section 3 (b) Share Alike: why does the license read "if You produce and Share Adapted Material"?
-- Does this mean "if you Share an Adapted Material that you produced"? If so, "produce" can be deleted, since the definition of Adapted Material already requires that "You" produced the Material itself.
-- Or does this mean "if You produce and/or Share Adapted Material"? If so, "and/or" should be said explicitly (and the choice of limiting the freedom to create Adapted Material for your own consumption should be discussed on this list... I can figure out some cases in which this makes sense, but it's a delicate policy choice!).

- in section 4, letter (c) should become (b) and vice versa. In fact, in our understanding, section (c) applies to "the contents of the database included in the Licensed Material" (and does not specifically concern an Adapted Material based on it): this is clear and uncontroversial if the content of what is not letter (c) appears before talking about any derivative database, but it's less clear if (c) follows the content of (b);
-- in any case, adding "included in the Licensed Material" (after "the contents of the database") could be helpful in interpreting this section.

Two other comments are:

- again in section 4, letter (b), the parenthesis "(but not its individual contents)" should be deleted: for many of us, it was considered just tautological (and present as a reminder of the fact that the law about databases does not generate autonomous rights on the contents of such databases), but some other people suggested some strange interpretations (e.g., suggesting that public domain content included in the Adapted Material could be kept somehow de facto "proprietary", despite the Share Alike license). It would be better to prevent such strange interpretations, deleting the content of this unnecessary parenthesis;
-- the clarification concerning the working of the law on databases (and not the CC license) could be provided in a FAQ, instead;

- in the definition of Share, why does the licenses include "reproduction" in the list of the "means or process" used to provide material to the public? In fact, making available is already and rightly included in the list (which is, in any case, just an exemplification and not an exhaustive list)... Again, adding "reproduction" suggested to some of our lawyers some strange interpretations, such as the idea that acts of reproductions which are just preparatory to making available (such as uploading a file on your own FTP server, even if you keep the password for yourself) could constitute "sharing"... I assume this is not the intention of CC, but I could not provide an explanation about the inclusion of "reproduction" in the list (apart from a generic "to be sure").

I'm of course available to clarify our position, in case it does not emerge clearly from the points above.

Thanks,

Federico

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Federico MORANDO
Director of Research and Policy &
Research Fellow

NEXA Center for Internet & Society
Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN
Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24
10129 TORINO - ITALY

tel.: +39 011 090 5954
fax: +39 011 090 7216
mob: +39 339 7507974
mail: federico.morando AT polito.it
web: http://nexa.polito.it