As usual, please feel free to forward any of my words to CC. I'm very busy and probably won't manage to do so myself.
Evan Prodromou wrote: > So, I have big news and a big question. > > Big news > -------- > > Creative Commons has announced the public draft of the next version of > their license suite: > > http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/6017 Reviewing the license, everything we were originally worried about appears to have been fixed (with the possible exception of the DRM business), and no new problems seem to have been introduced. It all looks DFSG-free to me, with the exception of "keep intact", noted below. The credits rule was restricted all the way down to the point where it only applies to a "list of all contributors", which renders it very innocuous -- this goes further than we asked for. The "keep intact" phraseology is still present, and still mildly troublesome: "You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties." *ALL* notices that refer to the License? Heck, I could make up my own extremely offensive notice which referred to the license -- not a copyright notice, but some sort of bizarre rant, talking about how I hate the license and giving a bogus interpretation of it. (People have attached weirder stuff to GPL-licensed works.) People should use phrasing like that in the Apache 2.0 license when drafting clauses like this: You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and However, I think the bad CC notice clause doesn't make most works under the license non-free: it only renders non-free works where someone *actually* includes such an obnoxious, inappropriate notice, and claims that it's covered by the notice clause. This sort of "notice" is clearly not CC's intent for the notice clause. If it were restricted to "legal notices", which I believe is what it's supposed to refer to, that would probably eliminate my concerns about this completely. I hate to bring this up at the "last minute", but it would be a definite improvement to replace "notices" with "legal notices" in this clause, or to do something similar to clarify it. > The changes from the 2.x version are largely due to an effort to make > the licenses compatible with the DFSG. Over the last year, the Debian > Creative Commons Workgroup has worked with Creative Commons to smooth > out the rough edges of license. DDs have already seen it, but there's a > report here on the work: > > http://evan.prodromou.name/Debian_Creative_Commons_Workgroup_report Congrats folks! > Big question > ------------ > > The main question I want to ask debian-legal is this: > > Does the anti-DRM requirement in the CCPL 3.0 draft, without a > parallel distribution proviso, make it incompatible with the > DFSG? Commented in another post.... if it really prohibited parallel distribution, I would think it's non-free -- but I think it does *not* prohibit parallel distribution. So I think it *is* free. -- Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bush admitted to violating FISA and said he was proud of it. So why isn't he in prison yet?... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
