> Are you saying that even if someone else published a work under
> CC-BY, you couldn't publish a derivative work as a Knol article, even
> if you attributed the base work to the author as required by CC-BY,
> and published it under Knol's own CC-BY licensing option?
That's my understanding, yes.
> Would it be, not because you can't re-mix a CC-BY work into your own
> CC-BY work (everyone says you can do this), but because you can't
> grant *Google* the unlimited right to create "derivative works",
> because that would include derivative works that don't include the
> CC-BY attribution?
I'm not entirely sure. Depending on jurisdiction, there may well be
moral rights to attribution granted by law in addition to whatever
rights are reserved when granting the license, so that might not even
be an issue. I think it's simply a matter of you not being able to
grant a license to someone else's work, regardless of what that
license says. If it's a derivative work, then it might be ok, since
you're the copyright holder of that work and it just contains, under
license, someone else's work. What people have been doing, however, is
just copying stuff straight from Wikipedia onto Knol and no modifying
it at all, it that case it isn't a derivative work it's just copying
the original work and you certainly can't grant Google a license to
that. I'm really not very sure how all this works - I need to go and
read CC-BY in detail, for a start! (I've read GFDL in plenty of
detail, but have never had a need to read the full CC licenses
properly, I've just scanned them.)