Cc-uk mailing list

[Prodromos Tsiavos <prodromos.tsiavos AT socio-legal-studies.oxford.ac.uk>]

Dear All,

After a week of comments I have made a brief list of issues that have been 
raised and added some of my own considerations (e.g. point d). I will also 
include these issues in the “Legal Bugs” document I am compiling.

There is a series of issues that we need to take into consideration:
(a)     The compatibility between different versions of CC licenses (thanks 
to 
Cory Doctorow, Rob Myers, David Harris, Chris Ahlert and Jonathan Mitchel for 
contributing on this problem). Although a CC mono-culture is not the 
objective 
we need to make sure that a minimum of compatibility between the various 
forms 
of licenses exists. This could be achieved:
i.      through the existence of provisions like CC 2.0 s.4b, which allows 
for 
the further copying/ dissemination of works under different CC license that 
are based on the same principles (thanks to Jonathan Mitcell for raising the 
point). The existing CC-UK unfortunately lacks such a provision but I will 
make sure that we will include in the next version
ii.     through the establishment of a series of standards or guidelines for 
the license standards such as the ones used by Debian hackers for the 
definition of an Open license or the OSI ones. (thanks to Andres Guadamuz for 
raising the point)
(b)     The question of whether we should revert to the structure an wording 
of the original CC 2.0 making changes only where appropriate or keeping the 
structure and wording of the new CC-UK draft. I think that the issue here is 
how much all the objectives and specifications of the original license have 
been incorporated in the CC-UK one and not sticking just to the wording of 
the 
license. Having said that I have to admit that there is a substantial number 
of differences between the two licenses, but we hope to rectify this problem 
in subsequent versions of the license.
(c)     The question of jurisdiction and of an EU CC. This was again a point 
raised by Jonathan and one that we have been discussing with Christiane 
Aschenfeldt the last couple of months. What do the rest of the people thing 
about it? 
(d)     The question of the license that governs the CC-UK license. This is 
very much related to the issue of CC mono/ multi-culture. I strongly believe 
that we need to encourage diversity of licenses that adhere to certain 
standards. Therefore, we need some kind of a license that governs the 
licenses 
we produce and a set of standards to classify them accordingly. We are 
currently not clear about how we license the text of the license, but I think 
we need to be more explicit about it as it does happen in all similar types 
of 
licenses. In terms of standard setting, we are thinking of moving towards the 
direction of a Debian-like standard, although this is something that the 
CC-UK 
alone cannot decide.
(e)     The honour and reputation 5D/5E provisions. We have already had 
problems with the Debian classification in relation to 5G and I am sure we 
will have issues with these provisions as well. I will check how the German 
License has dealt with this problem and get back to you.
(f)     The Warranties and Liability clauses and which of them should be 
preserved. 

Thanks
Prodromos Tsiavos,
Legal Project Lead, CC-UK