Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 3)
On Mar 18, 2005, at 21:28, Evan Prodromou wrote:
Hi, everyone. At long last, I've made some final revisions to the draft
summary of the Creative Commons 2.0 licenses.
Thank you for doing this. Now that OOo Authors and The Mozilla
Foundation (for developer.mozilla.org at least) have chosen the CC
camp, I expect the impact of CC on Free Software documentation only to
become greater.
(My interest in this matter is that I have been asked to license
documentation under CC-by or CC-by-sa for inclusion on
developer.mozilla.org. I am just about to agree to licensing under
CC-by-sa with a note that I'd appreciate it if The Mozilla Foundation
supported Debian's efforts in getting the licenses fixed.)
Although Creative Commons explicitly recommends that their licenses
not be used for programs [1]_, works licensed under the Creative
Commons licenses are still of interest to the Debian project. Debian
includes documentation for programs, and many programs included in
Debian use digital data such as images, sounds, video, or text that
are included with the programs in Debian.
Interestingly enough, CC recommends the GFDL for software documentation
without providing any rationale for their recommendation.
(http://creativecommons.org/faq#faq_entry_3647)
* If a work is a collection of essays by different authors, with
authorship credit given in the chapter titles, the Licensor's name
would have to be listed for each chapter title, even if they did
not contribute to it.
* If Alice writes her autobiography, and includes lyrics from Bob's
song in one chapter, she must give him credit for the entire work:
"The Autobiography of Alice, by Alice and Bob", or even The
Autobiography of Alice and Bob.
IANAL, but I would expect such inaccurate credit to violate the
statutory and/or common law rights of the persons credited in at least
some jurisdictions.
However, debian-legal feels that the visual distinctions are not
sufficiently clear to indicate that the trademark restrictions are
not part of the license, and some instances of the license found in
the wild include the trademark restrictions.
Not only the SVN Book but even a book that discusses licenses and is
written by a lawyer:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/book/
I find it strange that the CC representatives refuse to fix the
trademark problem because they have decided that the "legalcode" Web
pages are immutable.
--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
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