Cc-uk mailing list

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

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.