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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
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