We’ll be posting drafts of the new versions of our licenses later this week. About a month of review time will follow, and then we’ll revise as needed and turn the new licenses on. Throughout the next couple of weeks we will explain how the process of versioning will happen.

Meantime, here’s a preview of the highlights:

• Warranties will now be a matter of choice for the licensor. The new licenses will disclaim warranties, but licensors will of course be free to negotiate warranties with licensees who demand them. (We’ll also work on a protocol to help people add warranties if they want to — but that will come later on.) Special thanks to Karl-Friedrich Lenz and Dan Bricklin and many more for persuading us on this point. More explanation in a separate post soon.
• The attribution clause will include a link-back requirement simliar to the one previously discussed here. Licensees will only be required to link back to licensors if (1) it’s reasonably practical to do so; (2) the licensor actually specifies a URI; (3) that URI actually points to license information about the work.
• The Share Alike provision will be more flexible. The provision will allow licensees to license resulting derivative works under Creative Commons licenses that feature the same license restrictions/permissions, including future and iCommons versions of the same license.
• The Share Alike provision will also be clearer about what happens when different kinds of Share Alike content is mixed together (e.g., How to license a collage made from an SA photograph combined with an NC-SA photograph).
• We’re still looking into the issue of compatibility between our SA licenses and the GNU FDL. Compared to the above improvements, this potential tweak came on our radar pretty recently. We’ll do our best to address it. Thanks to the many of you who’ve written in on this point.
• Other minor tweaks.

More soon.