Re: CC-BY license.
Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@math.umd.edu> writes:
> I'm writing about the free/non-free status of the Creative Commons
> Attribution license, version 2.0 :
>
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode
Thanks for the direct link. A lot of folks prefer the actual text to be
posted as well, though. It makes things easier for those (like myself)
who are behind slow connections or even read mail offline.
> Version 2.0 looks almost the same to me, so I assume that the concerns
> remain. I would be glad to see the CC-BY license inch a little closer
> towards "free" status.
Me too. Obviously some of the CC licenses aren't intended to be what
the DFSG would pass as Free, but others (like this one) should in
principle be Free, it seems to me. Maybe with a go-between who knows CC
better than we do we can get the issues resolved.
> The license doesn't say that the name must be prominent. It says that it
> must be "at least as prominent" as other credit. Last week I asked the
> cc-community list if I could just have an appendix titled "contributors"
> and put everyone's names on it. They said that should be fine.
If the license said that as well it'd probably be fine. But the license
does talk about the prominence of the author's names (from section 4b):
"Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided,
however, that in the case of a Derivative Work or Collective Work,
at a minimum such credit will appear where any other comparable
authorship credit appears and in a manner at least as prominent as
such other comparable authorship credit."
So I have to echo Andrew Suffield here. Frankly, I'm very uneasy with
the whole idea of restrictions on how prominently parts of the document
are displayed. But perhaps if what "comparable authorship credit" means
were laid out more explicitly that would help.
> Now, back to this page:
>
> http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/dls-006-ccby
>
> The third justification refers to "the trademark notice on the license's
> website where it is not obvious if this notice is part of the license."
Did you mean to skip the second issue -- that of having to purge names?
> I'm pretty sure the trademarrk notice is not part of the license. What
> would you suggest the CC team do to make this sufficiently obvious? I
> will relay your suggestion to the CC team. They're a nice bunch. Who
> knows? They might just make the alteration.
I agree that that's probably an oversight. The original reason for the
issue, I think, is that a lot of us viewed the license via text-only
browsers, where the distinctions based on background color weren't
evident. When viewed that way it looked very much like part of the
license. If it could be made explicit that the last couple of
paragraphs (starting with "Creative Commons is not a party to this
license") is not part of the license itself, this issue would go away.
(Note: I haven't looked over the v2.0 license in any detail yet. The
above is assuming that nothing significant has changed. So though I
doubt it, I can't say for certain that there aren't other issues in the
v2 license.)
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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