After lots of positive feedback, today we’re removing the “draft” notice from our Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses. Not much has changed since the draft announcement, so most of the explanation below is cribbed from that. Of course just because this statement is no longer a draft does not mean CC could not improve its stewardship of BY-SA licenses — feedback is always welcome. And although this statement only applies to our stewardship of BY-SA licenses, we are committed to being excellent stewards of all of our licenses, and welcome suggestions across the board.

The statement we’re releasing today is part of a series addressing a suggested Wikipedia CC BY-SA migration checklist. It attempts describe 1) what CC does as a license developer and steward, 2) why CC Attribution-ShareAlike licenses play a special role in the movement for free cultural works — clearly inspired by the free software movement, and 3) CC’s intentions as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses, in the context of (1) and (2).

Note that while (1) provides a reasonable explanation of the role CC plays for all of the licenses it develops, (2) and (3) apply only to Attribution-ShareAlike licenses. Anyone who wants a thorough understanding of the contours of content in this age should take the time to understand the movement this statement addresses. However, other communities have different requirements. It is conceivable that at some point CC will need to address the requirements of other communities in relation to other particular CC licenses and tools that help those communities. One example of this — which takes a different form because all existing CC licenses are too restrictive for the community in question (but public domain and the in-development CC0 waiver are just right) — is the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data. Still other communities rely on more restrictive CC licenses.

This particular statement has been reviewed by many people within CC, CC’s international project teams, Wikipedians, and free software advocates. However, I take responsibility for its unwieldy verbosity and any minor or fundamental flaws it may have. Comments and criticism are strongly encouraged. Leave a comment on this post, or on the wiki (requires registration).

For reader convenience, the entire statement is copied below.

Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses

2008-04-17

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization that has created and serves as a steward for a suite of copyright licenses that enable creators to legally grant certain freedoms to the public and to clearly signal those freedoms to humans and machines.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses play a particularly important role in the Free or Libre Culture movement. This document lays out Creative Commons’ intention as steward for this class of licenses.

First, it is important to understand the activities Creative Commons undertakes as a steward of licenses:

• Create new versions of each class of licenses when warranted by community feedback and suggestions for improvements. As of this writing most license classes have versioned from 1.0 (released December, 2002) to 2.0 (released May, 2004), 2.5 (released June, 2005), and 3.0 (released March, 2007).
• Port each license to account for the nuances of copyright law in jurisdictions worldwide. As of this writing ports have been completed in 44 jurisdictions in conjunction with local legal experts in each of these jurisdictions.
• For each specific license, maintain at a stable, canonical URL such as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ the following:
  • A license deed intended to convey the properties of the license in a manner useful to non-lawyer humans, including short textual descriptions and readily recognizable icons.
  • Translations of the aforementioned textual descriptions, so that the license may be useful to speakers of as many human languages as possible.
  • Metadata intended to convey the properties of the license in a manner useful to computers — but for the purpose of making licensed content more discoverable and usable, not for turning computers against their owners with DRM.
  • A copy of the license itself.
• Develop, maintain, and encourage software and services that make Creative Commons licenses available at the point of creation and publishing, for example our web-based license chooser, widget, web services API, and OpenOffice.org plugin.
• Develop, maintain, and encourage software and services that make Creative Commons licensed works available at the point of discovery and consumption, for example a web search interface and browser plugins.
• Participate in standards efforts that facilitate the software and services above, for example the World Wide Web Consortium.
• Maintain close contact with the communities that use Creative Commons licenses to ensure the licenses and associated tools are serving the communities well.
• Educate the public about the licenses and associated tools.

Millions of creators and users expect Creative Commons to undertake these stewardship activities, and we recognize and attempt to follow through with this great responsibility. The responsibility to communities using Attribution-ShareAlike licenses is even greater, as many in those communities rely on Creative Commons to serve as a reliable steward not just in a practical legal and technical sense, but in an ideological sense.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses are informed and inspired by the principles and lessons of the Free Software movement. Although certain Creative Commons licenses allow granting of relatively narrow freedoms, in this document we use Free and Libre in the sense used by the Free Software movement. As applied to content, these principles require a license to grant the following essential freedoms to ALL users of licensed works:

• the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
• the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
• the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
• the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

These freedoms are taken directly from the Definition of Free Cultural Works, and more thoroughly explained there. Thus, the first commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:

1) All versions and ports of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses MUST satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

However, a license without the ShareAlike requirement could satisfy this definition. The crucial lesson learned from the Free Software movement is that Freedom is a public good, and the dominant Free license should not only grant essential freedoms, but protect those freedoms for all users. This is accomplished by copyleft, which adds a requirement that anyone distributing a copy of a Free work or an adaptation (also known as a derivative) of that work grant to other users the same freedoms they received. The GNU General Public License is the dominant copyleft software license, indeed the dominant Free Software license (Creative Commons uses and recommends the GNU GPL for software).

For its content licenses, Creative Commons calls the copyleft requirement ShareAlike. This requirement protects the freedoms of all users by requiring that adaptations of works licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike to also be distributed under an Attribution-ShareAlike license, or a license deemed by Creative Commons to grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users in a compatible fashion. Thus, the second commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:

2) All versions and ports of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses MUST protect the freedom of all users by requiring that when an adaptation of a work distributed under an Attribution-ShareAlike license is distributed, the adaptation must be distributed under the same license, or a license deemed by Creative Commons to grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users in a compatible fashion (to be clear, such a compatible license must also satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works).

As described above, the ShareAlike requirement becomes active when an adaptation of a licensed work is distributed. Creative Commons may choose to add language to future versions of its licenses specifying that particular uses constitute adaptations from the perspective of the license, where such may not be clear. For example, since version 2.0, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses have included language similar to the following:

For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (“synching”) will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License.

It would abuse the trust of licensors to add a clarification that narrowed the scope of what is considered an adaptation, for this would introduce a loophole by which the freedom of all users would not be protected. As such, the third commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:

3) Any clarification of whether a use constitutes an adaptation for the purposes of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses may only broaden the scope of uses considered adaptations rather than collections.

When a copyleft license is widely used, it not only protects essential freedoms for all users, it fosters the spread of those freedoms. This occurs when people who may not know or care about Freedom as understood by the Free Software movement, but merely wish to use works that happen to be Free, release adaptations under a Free license in order to fulfill the requirements of the license. By the same token, if there are pools of Free content that may not be mixed because their copyleft style licenses are legally incompatible, the spread of essential freedoms is constricted. The fourth commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses could be seen as implicit in the second commitment, but it is important to call out separately here:

4) Creative Commons will strive to enable compatibility between Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and other copyleft content licenses that grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users (to be clear, any candidate for compatibility must also satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works).

While every work that expands the universe of Free or Libre content is important, Free licenses play an especially crucial role for works with many collaborators. Unless each collaborator agrees to contribute under the terms of a Free license, the work rapidly becomes unusable by anyone, as past contributors must either be tracked down, or their contributions excised, before the work may be distributed or built upon (except as permitted by fair use and other limitations on copyright). But Free licenses are not enough for massively collaborative projects. In addition to social and technical affordances thankfully beyond the scope of copyright, such projects need particular licensing affordances, particularly around attribution requirements. Creative Commons took a step toward addressing these needs in version 2.5 of its licenses, but there may be more to do in this regard. Thus, the fifth commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses.

5) Creative Commons will strive to ensure that Attribution-ShareAlike licenses meet the needs of massively collaborative works, while remaining useful for works with one or a few creators.

Our final commitment is a simple restatement of one of the stewardship activities described above, with emphasis on Free and Libre content communities and Attribution-ShareAlike:

6) Maintain close contact with Free and Libre content communities to ensure Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and associated tools are serving these communities well.

If you are a member of one of these communities, take this as an invitation to help us meet these commitments to you. Friendly suggestions for improvement and criticism if we seem to go astray are equally valuable.