Creative Commons 4.0 process starts

[Posted December 12, 2011 by corbet]

The Creative Commons project has announced the beginning of the process leading to version 4.0 of its license suite. They have some specific issues to solve and are looking for input on other improvements that should be made to the licenses at the same time. "The treatment of sui generis database rights in the 3.0 licenses continues to be a show-stopper for many, including governments in Europe. This fosters an environment in which custom licenses proliferate, inevitably resulting in silos of incompatibly-licensed content that cannot be maximally shared and remixed. But there exist still other reasons for pursuing 4.0 at this time, including the desire to adjust the licenses to more fully support adoption by intergovernmental organizations and those looking for a more internationally-oriented license suite."

Creative Commons 4.0 process starts

Posted Dec 12, 2011 17:51 UTC (Mon) by mlinksva (guest, #38268) [Link]

Thanks for posting this. There are a few items for consideration in the CC 4.0 process that could especially benefit from the attention of the FLOSS community.

* http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/Technical_protection_... -- in the past CC has considered alternative approaches (in particular parallel distribution) with prompting especially by people involved in Debian. The GPLv3's circumvention permission is also very interesting (I find it really elegant, and would be nice to be aligned with GPLv3...), but I'm not certain it is strong enough to satisfy people attached to the current TPM prohibition in CC licenses.

* http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/ShareAlike -- in particular compatibility with other copyleft licenses, possibly even the GPL in some cases. Personally, I think MPL2's constrained compatibility with GPL could be a fruitful approach.

Also note that "sui generis database rights" quoted from the announcement, has been heavily discussed in a previous LWN post, see https://lwn.net/Articles/422493/

Creative Commons 4.0 process starts

Posted Dec 13, 2011 9:18 UTC (Tue) by osma (subscriber, #6912) [Link]

I really hope that this gets going quickly and the sui generis database rights issues with CC 3.0 are resolved. Right now governments across Europe are scrambling to write their own, all slightly different licenses for open data.

Also I hope that the process works out better than for CC 3.0. As I've understood it, there's a resource bottleneck at the US-based CC organization which has slowed down the approval of localized versions. E.g. there's still no approved Finnish CC 3.0 license set despite the best efforts of some Finnish open data activists and FLOSS lawyers.

CC vs. SEO

Posted Dec 16, 2011 23:05 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Defining what is and isn't a commercial use on the web is bigger than just whether or not there are ads on the page or on linked-to pages.

A lot of text can't be put under a Creative Commons license for search engine optimization reasons. If a higher-ranking site starts running a copy of your article, your original site can suffer a duplicate content penalty.

If the original work is indexable web content, hosting a copy without "link rel='canonical'" pointing to the author's version is a commercial use, in a sense.

Can legal code reflect this, or can you just not CC-license anything you want to SEO?