Re: Draft summary of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses (version 2)
Sean Kellogg wrote:
reading this Draft Summary really set me off.
I'm sincerely sorry about that. Let me point out that I was originally extremely
hostile to most of the objections posited to the Attribution 1.0 license, most
of which are replicated in this draft summary:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2004-June/000913.html
But I really think debian-legal needs to rethink
some of the absolutest positions it takes and recognize the law is not like
software... it will never be perfect... it is an art of compromise. I
advise against letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.
I think the key problem here is that we're taking the most pessimistic possible
view where there are ambiguities in the license text or where the text is vague
and unclear.
Personally, I believe that the people who work on Creative Commons are good,
smart, and dedicated people. I think that folks who use CC licenses are generous
and express great good will by sharing their creative fruits with the world.
But in evaluating licenses, we have to assume that the Licensor is not good,
generous, or rational. If we can convince ourselves that the license grants the
licensees freedom _even_when_ the Licensor is possessed by Captain Howdy and
starts spewing green goo out of their eye sockets, then we can be reasonably
certain that works released under the license are really Free.
Unfortunately, taking this tack makes us look like mean and vituperative
a-holes. We treat Licensors -- people who are unselfishly sharing their work
with the world -- like insane megalomaniacs. It's sucky, but it's a necessary
part of the process.
A more specific example for Debian would be a programmer who creates
documentation licensed under Attribution 2.0. He could require that
references in derived versions to design or implementation decisions he made
for the program be removed.
Are you saying the Attribution License is non-DSFG because the original author
can say "take my name out of the derived work"???
Yes. If the Licensor can severely limit the content of modified versions, then
the work isn't free, per DFSG 3.
If you design a program and then say, this was designed by Programmer Joe, and
Programmer Joe, embarressed by the program, says he wants his name taken out,
the court will order you to take away the attribution. It is against the law
to say someone did something if they did not.
Yes. It's illegal to defame someone by saying something untrue about them.
However, the clause doesn't say that the licensor can request that you take out
untrue references. It says that the licensor can request that you take out _any_
references to them, true or not.
So, if Programmer Joe really wrote a program and made the documentation
available under the by 2.0, and I created a modified version and wrote in the
modified documentation:
Programmer Joe's version of this algorithm ran in O(N^2) time, but our
new version runs in O(NlogN) time.
...then, as the license is written now, Joe could request that I remove his name
from this sentence.
Now, is this earthshatteringly bad? Not really. We could obviously work around
it, and program documentation that leaves out reference to the original version
and its authors would probably be more or less usable.
But opinion here seems to lean to the side that letting Licensors have this
level of editorial control over modified versions of a document makes that
document non-free.
"comparable authorship credit"
This could mean either "credit for comparable authorship" or "comparable
credit for authorship".
Its amazing how adding words to a phrase changes its meaning, even more so
when changing the order. "Comparable Authorship Credit" looks/sounds/means
nothing like "comparable credit for authorship"... come on, the words are
switched around and there is a "for" added.
That's to make it more clear that there are two different ways to read the
phrase. It might be easier to see the difference with parentheses, like in a C
program: "(comparable authorship) credit" versus "comparable (authorship credit)".
> Read it the way that make sense.
Both make syntactic sense. One way is excessively burdensome, and the other is
not. We have to be pessimistic here.
"These restrictions make excessive demands on both licensor and licensee, and
abridge their fair use rights to the Creative Commons trademarks." Cute, but
untrue. A trademark is not a copyright... and Fair Use rights are
significantly less with a trademark over a copyright.
That's debatable. However, the key point is that I can use the name "Creative
Commons" right now to talk about the Creative Commons organization without
getting their explicit permission. According to the trademark clause, as stated,
I could not, if I were a licensor or licensee.
Let's be serious for just a moment... do you really believe that Prof. Lessig is going to
encourage restriction of something in violation of established fair use
rights. Something tells me the thousands of hours spent preparing for
arguements before the Supreme Court should help us give the benefit of the
doubt.
I think most of us agree that the trademark clause is _supposed_ to mean, "We
give you the right to use this trademark to say that your work is CC-licensed,
but we're not granting you any more trademark rights than that." The problem is
that the wording is such that it actually takes away rights that people have if
they don't use the license. We're just asking that CC change the wording to more
clearly express their intentions.
will debain-legal just
say "this is bad" or does it have recommendations as to how to fix this
issue.
I'm guessing that you didn't read all the way to the end of the document.
There's a section with recommendations for how Creative Commons can make the
next version of its licenses compatible with the DFSG. Reading now, I see that
the trademark provisions aren't covered in those recommendations. I'll add in
Nathan Nerode's really nice suggested text in the next revision.
Thats the end of the attribution license comments. I'm going to reserve
further comments to see if anyone cares about these concerns.
Absolutely. It wouldn't have been posted for comment if your concerns weren't
worth considering.
~ESP
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