[Foundation-l] Creative Commons CC-BY-SA Draft Statement of Intent

[Erik Moeller]

The folks at Creative Commons have posted a draft statement of intent
regarding the CC-BY-SA license:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Draft_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent

I've just read through it, and I'm really, really happy. Through this
statement, CC has taken a first stab at defining in detail their
intentions as stewards of the license. This is key to building trust
with the Wikimedia community and other stakeholders in the free
culture movement.

The statement of intent clarifies a number of key points, including a
commitment to keep the license in compliance with the Definition of
Free Cultural Works, and a strong promise to only broaden, but not
narrow the definition of what constitutes an adaptation under the
terms of the license.

We are continuing our conversations about that particular aspect, and
my personal hope is that we will figure out a way to clearly state
through the license that adaptations such as a picture embedded into a
newspaper article trigger the share-alike clause, i.e. the newspaper
article would be CC-BY-SA licensed. (Or, as I would argue, in those
particular cases, any other DFCW compliant license.)

You can post comments regarding the draft on the wiki talk page, or on
the cc-licenses mailing list:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses

This is a really important development, and I hope that everyone who
cares about the future of free culture licenses will get involved in
these conversations. :-)

My congratulations go to Creative Commons for taking this initiative.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate