Developers at API Digital

I was clicking around on StackOverflow.com earlier, trying to fix a problem with an application I was working on, when i got interested in the Creative Commons license badge at the bottom. I clicked on it, and read over what you could do with it. The CC licenses offer a pretty good amount of freedom to muck about with others content, which is good because it allows people to create derivative works that expand the human sphere of experience. I mean, without derivative works, you wouldn’t have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (best play evar!)

It turns out that StackOverflows content is licensed under Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, basically meaning that you can Distribute freely, and derive content(remix) from the work.

Anyway, I saw at the bottom there was an upgrade for the license (what can’t be upgraded these days) and was reading through the different verbiage on the 3.0 license. The only real change on the dumbed down page was adding ‘or a compatible’ to the list of derivative works licensing requirements. Seems innocuous enough, however, in the legaleeze (e.g. Legal Code) …

You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US)); (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License.

Part (iv) looks kind of cool. It means if I found another license that was kinda like this that I liked better, I could license my derivative work under that. That’s very neat of Creative Commons, letting me change licenses. HOWEVER.

“Creative Commons Compatible License” means a license that is listed at http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses that has been approved by Creative Commons as being essentially equivalent to this License, including, at a minimum, because that license: (i) contains terms that have the same purpose, meaning and effect as the License Elements of this License; and, (ii) explicitly permits the relicensing of adaptations of works made available under that license under this License or a Creative Commons jurisdiction license with the same License Elements as this License.

So let’s check out http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses and tell me how many licenses you see there. Yeah, none. So, if you use a Creative Commons license, your content is, for the foreseeable future, trapped in a Creative Commons License.