Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Engel Nyst <engel.nyst AT gmail.com>]

Thank you for your explanation.

On 08/19/2014 12:09 PM, Sarah Pearson wrote:
> As explained on the other thread, downstream reusers of the
> adaptation can refer to the FAL to discern how to attribute and
> ShareAlike (thanks to 2a5B). But otherwise, BY-SA and the FAL apply
> to the new work and reusers must refer back to BY-SA whenever they
> are trying to determine the terms and conditions that apply to the
> particular rights the original author has in the work. That means the
> scope of the rights being licensed by the original author (the
> "Licensed Rights" as defined in BY-SA 4.0) does not change when the
> FAL is applied to the adaptation.

The second phrase doesn't seem entirely correct: reusers don't have to
refer to BY-SA 4.0 when they try to determine /the terms and
conditions/ because these are what is replaced by FAL via 2(a)(5)(B).

Otherwise, the rights being licensed are those in BY-SA. I think it's
quite clear from the texts that there are no other rights being
licensed, and it would be unexpected otherwise. Conversely, the
permissions for all of them were granted; my dumb statement that they'd
be "unlicensed" is just that, dumb.

However, here's an alternative interpretation of the interaction of
2(a)(5)(B) with the different scope:
* copyright and related rights, including database rights, are being
licensed. The BY-SA 4.0 licensor makes the permission grants we see in
the text;
* the conditions for copyright are those FAL states, for copyright. The
BY-SA 4.0 licensor has additionally licensed their work under FAL so
reusers look only at FAL to know what's expected of them;
* the conditions for database rights are those FAL states, for database
rights - meaning none. BY-SA 4.0 licensor has given permissions to their
use, but when we look for conditions, we look at FAL, and there are NO
conditions for that use.

That's not an invalid construct, it's an unconditional license for
database rights.

Alternatively said: lets assume FAL had a section for copyright, and a
section for patents, but no sui-generis database rights.

I don't see how would the BY-SA 4.0 licensor claim to enforce their
terms, when there's no section to match with. There's no criteria to
choose the copyright section (its conditions), versus patent section
[1]. I can't say we can roll a die to figure out which to match...


[1] Patent section would likely not have a share-alike condition, though
the concept of patentleft exists, it's not in mainstream copyright
licenses. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patentleft

--
"Excuse me, Professor Lessig, may I ask you to sign this CLA, so we can 
*legally* have your permission to distribute your CC-licensed works?"