Cc-uk mailing list

["Andres Guadamuz" <a.guadamuz AT ed.ac.uk>]

Dear all,

I have some general comments that I want to make. I will leave the detailed
comment about the licence clauses for later. 

- I think that the question of compatibility of the licence should
eventually be decided by CC's Board of Directors. I have been looking for
some official document that specifies compatibility parameters, or that sets
instructions to the iCommons draft teams. Is there such a document? If there
is none, I strongly believe that there should be one. 

The only list of instructions that I have found are the Baseline rights and
restrictions page:
http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/fullrights

I believe that this list should exist in a more detailed form (apologies if
it already does), much like OSI's Open Source Definition. 

- I don't believe that the American and UK licences should numerically
identical; as there may be clauses that are not needed in one of them, but
needed in another (the attribution clause needs to be different in the UK
IMO). However, I agree that the structure of both licences should be as
close as possible. 

- The iCommons project already exists, so the question of having 100
different national licences is moot, at the moment we have to agree that
eventually there will be 100 national CC licences (there are already 19
drafts). This means that iCommons needs a compliance mechanism ASAP, or you
will end up with 100 licences incompatible with the original CC. I
personally don't see the point of changing the UK licence too much and call
it a CC licence, as if one disagrees with the general idea and structure of
the existing licence, why not change it into an incompatible licence and
distribute it under another name?  

- Do we really want a CC licence monoculture? Just a thought. 

Regards, 

 -------------------------
Andres Guadamuz
AHRB Research Centre for Studies in
Intellectual Property and Technology Law
Old College, South Bridge
Edinburgh EH8 9YL 

Tel: 44 (0)131 6509699
Fax: 44 (0)131 6506317
a.guadamuz AT ed.ac.uk
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/