The Creative Commons organization has announced that it has launched the 3.0 version of their license.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
One thing new is the “generic” license which is spun from the US license which is known as the “unported” license. The idea is that it would be based on the international intellectual property treaties. The specific treaties include the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996, the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty of 1996, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the Rome Convention of 1961, and others.
Another issue that was tackled was the issue of moral rights and society royalties. Creative Commons defined it with the following: “Moral rights recognize an author’s personal attachment to their creativity and seek to protect that connection.”
Creative Commons went on, “To do so, the Creative Commons licenses, with one exception, have taken the approach of not interfering with the author’s moral right of integrity in those jurisdictions that recognize this right.
The one exception is in Canada where the moral right of integrity is waivable. Because Canada was one of the first ten countries to port the CC licenses and one of the first (if not the only) to have a waivable moral right of integrity, on advice of our local affiliate, the CC Canada licenses choose to waive the right of integrity in order to ensure that the licensor’s intention in choosing to permit derivative works was not compromised. However, in all other CC licenses for jurisdictions that recognize the moral right of integrity, the right was retained albeit in different forms; again, on advice from local affiliates.”
Other new changes include: No Endorsement Language, BY-SA – Compatibility Structure, and Clarifications Negotiated With Debian & MIT.
Of course, the last is particularly interesting because it mentions issues surrounding DRM. It is this debate that had divided the GPL community in the 3.0 version still in the works. It may be something Creative Commons saw being a major issue with many creators who use the license and left it out in this version.
A detailed analysis of the new version is available via the Creative commons Wiki. The blog page also has a series of blog posts that detail the process of Creative Commons 3.0.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
