Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Marketply <contact AT marketply.org>]

It seems too disruptive in section 2 to jump from A to B at

 

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grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to:

1. reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part, including for commercial purposes,
2. produce but not Share Adapted Material.

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People will go "what?"  *headscratch*

 

We could just add a clarifying explanation immediately after B, because it'll obviously trigger questions. 

 

Heck, a great approach to the entire license would be to do like the 500px does by adding explanations that aren't legally binding but clarify things in everyday language.

 

It takes more work but the outcomes would be worth it: less uncertainty, less wild misinterpretations.

 

Too many legalese forces people to jump through mental hoops, trying to jigsaw puzzle an interpretation out of various disjointed parts throughout the document. 

 

Creative Commons already takes the step of making a human readable digest version. We could go an extra step to a full-blown human readable document. People will love the thoughtful effort and it's newsworthy for attracting attention and it sets a good precedent for other licenses and no one's eyes glaze over reading it. 

 

Little things like this that can bring in a lot more people.

 

Marino Hernandez
(just a founder of Marketply)
203-429-4205

 

On October 23, 2013 at 7:32 PM Sarah Pearson <sarah AT creativecommons.org> wrote:

As promised, we have updated the BY-ND and BY-NC-ND files on the staging server to reflect the change proposed on this thread last week.

The changes are noted in strike-through and color so you can see how they have changed from the prior version.

The edits are in the following parts of the licenses:

- Adapted Material definition

- Section 2(a)(1)

- Section 3(a)(1)

- Section 4(a)

http://staging.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode
http://staging.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

best,

Sarah

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Sarah Pearson <sarah AT creativecommons.org> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Before we lock the legal code and publish the license suite, we have one final change to propose for the two ND licenses only.

We propose changing the ND licenses to make it clear that licensees may create adaptations so long as those adaptations are not shared publicly.

This change would make it unambiguous that adapting licensed works for
personal or private use is permitted under any of the 6 licenses in the CC suite. Because of exceptions and limitations to copyright, personal adaptations should already fall outside the scope of the licenses in most cases. However, there are reasonable arguments that this is not always true everywhere in the world. This change to the ND licenses would harmonize the result worldwide, making it unequivocal that such private uses are permitted. As a matter of policy, we believe this is the right result.

 

One benefit of this change is clarifying that text and data mining are permitted under all 6 CC licenses. Text and data mining activity should fall outside of the scope of copyright and the other licensed rights, but because such analysis often involves creating adapted material in the process, there is some uncertainty with regard to the licenses that do not permit adaptations. We gave serious consideration to pursuing an exception within the licenses that would specifically permit text and data mining, but this has proven to be especially difficult since the type of activity is wide-ranging and the field is continually changing. The definition of which activities constitute text and data mining and which do not is simply not clear-cut, and attempting to create one risks enshrining a soon-to-be outdated definition in the 4.0 licenses.

This particular proposal is generic, which is one of its strengths: while it is not specific to text and data mining, it enables these activities to the extent there was any uncertainty about whether an adaptation was created during the process. However, it doesn't solve the problem entirely. Under BY-ND, licensees still may not share adaptations. While the output of mining will rarely, if ever, constitute an adaptation, this could prevent sharing of the adapted dataset used for mining, for example. Also, where the content was under BY-NC-ND, licensees still may not create adaptations privately for commercial purposes. For these reasons and many others, CC continues to urge licensors not to use the ND licenses for scientific data, and we do not intend this change to make the licenses more suitable for this use. However, for data that is made available under the ND licenses, this proposed change would remove some possible barriers to text and data mining.

Because adapting works for private use often falls outside the scope of the licensed rights and because such private use does not meaningfully affect the rights holder, we see this change as substantively minor. But to the extent it resolves uncertainty over whether such uses are permitted, we see it as a clear improvement, with little to argue against it.

We will be posting updates to the html of the legal code to reflect this  change shortly. We look forward to your feedback.

best,

Sarah