Re: Creative Commons CC0

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

"Joe Smith" <unknown_kev_cat@hotmail.com> writes:

> The legal code is long and complex, because it can be. The whole point
> of the Creative Commons
> Licenses is that the license text is not included with the work, but
> instead just the license URL is included.

I'd hardly call that “the whole point” of the licenses; if anything,
it's a property of how they're used.

It's also a pretty poor practice: it makes access to that specific
document online a pre-condition to knowing the license terms in the
work at any given time, and it denies the possibility of the URL
leading to a different document (or to nothing) at some arbitrary
future time.

> Thus the CC0 licence takes only one line to apply to a work.
> 
> #<authorname>makes this work avilable under CC0
> (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
> 
> That is a heck of a lot simpler than including the Expat license

Nonsense. Exactly the same approach could be taken with the Expat
license; this is not a distinguishing feature of the Creative Commons
licenses.

> Of course, for software sticking with Expat makes good sense, but
> Expat could be a bit of a pain to use as the license for an mp3 (for
> example).

Of course, an MP3 is also software :-) and is equally valid as a work
for applying the Expat license.

-- 
 \       “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe |
  `\   or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” —Arthur C. Clarke, |
_o__)                                                             1999 |
Ben Finney