creative commons through the looking glass: CCau Update

CCau Update :: Towards CCau Version 3.0

Published by elliott bledsoe on Tuesday, 17 June 2008 at 11:58 AM

Last week CC Australia (finally) released the public drafts of our proposed version 3.0 update to the Australian licences. This will bring the Australian jurisdictional licences up to date with the international standard.

Why the need for consultation if we're just moving up to the international standard you ask? Well as I've argued before, the concept of open access should be more than a legal mechanism to facilitate access to content that would otherwise be unaccessible under traditional copyright systems. This is important, but to enhance its utility, open content licensing systems should also be accessible to everyone; in the sense that anyone should be able to read them and make sense of them. That's what we're going for with the proposed Australian 3.0 licences.

Over on the version 3.0 page this is what CCau has to say on the decision:

Rather than writing the licences as a straight translation from the Unported (ie non-country specific) licences provided by Creative Commons International, we've instead decided to base them on the excellent licences produced last year by our friends in New Zealand, which they in turn based on the England and Wales licences. The great thing about these licences is that they're written in plain English rather than legalese - which means they're much easier for non-lawyers to understand.

A good move I say, but the only way this is effective is if it really is understandable by people with little prior-legal knowledge.

We have released two of the licences for consultation. The Attribution licence and the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike:

Before I go on to explain some stuff around this update, I feel I should explain, like CCau does, the reason for only releasing two licences. The reason is quite simple really: who has time to read 6 new licences? Plus, given that CC licence system is a modular process whereby the elements of protocols are fitted together to make different licences, you only really need to read (for example) the attribution bit once. It is the same in all the other licences. Get it?

The other reason is because we feel it is easier to release the simplest of the licences (Attribution) and the most complex (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike). And again, between both of them they also contain just about all of the language that's used for the other licences.

There is a whole page on the Creative Commons international website about the changes that were made for the generic version 3.0 licences, so I won't go through that in detail. In summary:

introduction of a clause that restricts licensees from improperly implying a relationship with or an endorsement by the licensor of their reuse of the work that is licensed (find out more);
introduction of a clause that allows derivatives made within the scope of a CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence to be re-licensed under a “Creative Commons Compatible License” (find out more);
clarifications to take account of concerns of major parties (eg those expressed by Debian (find out more) and MIT (find out more)); and
brings all jurisdictions up to the same point in regards to moral rights (ie that moral rights are not waived by CC licences) (find out more) and the relationship with regards to collecting societies (find out more) language for all jurisdictions.

Of course the Australian 2.5 licences already included this language about moral rights and collecting societies.

A huge shout out/hat tip to Jessica Coates from CC Australia for getting these drafts out. Please have a good look over the licences, even if you're not a lawyer (in fact, particularly if you're not) so we can be sure we've achieved our aim of a more open and accessible (ie understandable) licensing model.

For full details see the version 3.0 page on the Creative Commons Australia website.