Re: CC-based proposal (was FDL: no news?)
Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 19:08, MJ Ray wrote:
>
>> Numerous people have tried many angles. More are welcome, as we
>> clearly haven't found the correct approach yet.
>
> So, I'd like to write a draft summary for the 6 Creative Commons 2.0
> licenses:
>
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Why, thank you.
> Four of them (with NonCommercial or NoDerivatives elements) are clearly
> not intended to be DSFG-free. It seems to the untrained eye that the
> other two (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike) are. The problems we
> have with these licenses are more or less ones of clarity and wording
> rather than intention.
And they're the same problems summarized earlier about the Creative Commons
1.0 licenses.
(1) The trademark notices in the box at the bottom should be clearly not
part of the license. It needs to *say* this in the "legal code" page, in
visible text (not an HTML comment).
(2) DRM requirement is unclear.
"You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control
access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this
License Agreement."
What precisely is a "manner inconsistent with the terms of this License
Agreement"?
This may seem to prohibit encrypted distribution, even if plaintext
distribution is simultaneously available to the same people.
The belief on debian-legal is that you should require unencumbered
distribution alongside encumbered distribution, rather than outright
prohibiting encumbered distribution.
(2 how-to-fix)
This can be fixed easily by writing something like the following:
"You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control
access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this
License Agreement -- unless you also simultaneously distribute, publicly
display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work to the
same recipients without such measures."
(There may be other ways to fix this clause.)
(3) The requirement to remove all references to the author on demand.
"If You create a Collective Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to
the extent practicable, remove from the Collective Work any reference to
such Licensor or the Original Author, as requested. If You create a
Derivative Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent
practicable, remove from the Derivative Work any reference to such Licensor
or the Original Author, as requested."
(3a) First of all, this seems to be very difficult to reconcile with the
credit requirement. If I am required to:
'...give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You
are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the
Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; to the
extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any,
that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI
does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the
Work; and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of
the Work in the Derivative Work...'
then how can I remove the references to the Original Author while complying
with the license?
Perhaps leaving the credit in is allowed under "to the extent practicable",
but if so it should be made clear. Conversely, perhaps omitting the credit
is permitted if the author requests removal of his name, but if so that
should be made clear.
(3b) Second, this restricts entirely reasonable uses of the author's name.
Suppose "Mein Kampf" was licensed under CC-by. If I made a collective work
containing it, and also essays on how evil Hitler was, Hitler could request
the removal of his name from the collective work. This would effectively
prohibit the publication of the collective work. Come on! If the "to the
extent practicable" is intended to allow this, again, it needs to be made
more explicit.
(3 how-to-fix)
I think this is intended along similar lines to the BSD no-promotion clauses
(which are silly and pointless anyway). If so, I believe what you want to
say is something vaguely like this:
"If You create a Collective Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to
the extent practicable, remove from the Collective Work any reference to
such Licensor or the Original Author (as requested) which may appear to
endorse or promote the Collective Work. If You create a Derivative Work,
upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove
from the Derivative Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original
Author (as requested) which may appear to endorse or promote the Derivative
Work."
If not, I really want to know what the purpose *is*, so that we can suggest
a fix.
(4) "comparable authorship credit" prominence requirement is too vague
"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."
This looks like a lawyerbomb. What exactly is a "comparable" authorship
credit, when dealing with a derivative work? *Any* authorship credit? One
for about the same number of lines of text? One for the same number of
hours of work? What? If we don't know what's comparable we can't know
when we're obeying the license and when we aren't.
The only clear way to avoid triggering that lawyerbomb is to put *all*
authorship credits whereever *any* authorship credit appears, with
identical prominence. This would pose difficulties for works like ReiserFS
(which is named after one of its authors -- would all authors have to be
put in the name?), and could also, perversely, lead to poor crediting as
important authors are buried in a morass of contributions.
> We could hand this over to Creative Commons with some suggested changes,
> as well as some information about our project and why having works be
> DFSG-free is important.
This is really an excellent idea.
>
> ~ESP
--
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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