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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-uk] Issues and suggestions
  • Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 22:16:02 +0100

Back from holiday. :-)

On 19 Jul 2004, at 13:05, Prodromos Tsiavos wrote:

(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:

AFAICT the iCommons licenses are intended to be uniform as far as possible.

http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/
http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/overview

The Australian iCommons license is a very good example of coping with differences from American law whilst keeping the license intact as far as possible:

http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/au/translated- license.pdf

The footnotes are instructive.

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)

I think i. is ideal. The guidelines from ii. would basically be the original (US) license. :-)

(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.

Yes. The wording of the CC-UK license is much, much clearer than the original CC-2.0 license. I've had to read CC-2.0 too many times... :-)

That said, do CC themselves have a position on this?

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.

That's great.

As a layperson I was interested by Jonathan Mitchell's point that under UK law contracts must be in plain English. One thing the Americans are pretty big on is how the GPL is (in US law) a license not a contract. Are licenses contracts in English/Welsh law?

(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?

I think it's a very good idea, although with the GPL ruled legal in Germany and considered broken in France that's possibly a difficult aim. It depends how fine-grained CC and its consumers want the licenses, and whether an EU-level license would be strong enough across Europe. Whatever the granularity, CC should be polymorphic (to borrow a term from computer programming): CC-BY-SA should mean, as far as possible, the same everywhere. The "legal code" (CC's term) under the hood should do whatever is needed to realise this.

(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.

Do you mean licenses other than the 6 CC licenses? If so, I respectfully disagree and I believe that this is counter to the spirit and letter of the iCommons project.
Diversity of licenses in the software Open Source community is divisive and problematic, not empowering. CC provide a range of licenses that cover most of the fault lines in Open Source software (sharealike and noncommercial being the major ones). Let's learn from and avoid the woes of the Open Source community.

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.

One thing I don't think I mentioned before is that as well as these being above and beyond the CC-2.0 requirements they can be used by mischievous or egotistical contributors to wreak havoc on users.

- Rob.





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