Difference between revisions of "License Versions"

This page identifies some of the improvements to the Creative Commons license suite from the publication of the first licenses in December, 2002, through the current version 3.0, and highlights important similarities among the major license versions released to date.

License Blog Posts

The chart below presents the major license versions, their launch dates, and blog posts calling for public comment, announcing the launch of a license suite, and explaining changes to new licenses. It also includes posts referencing unfinished version 3.x (3.01, 3.5) licenses, which are not in active discussion and may or may not ever be published. Version 3.0 is most up to date Creative Commons license suite, but the 3.x license discussions address further potential upgrades and changes that may be folded into a new version 4.0 license. The License Errata page, to which you should feel free to contribute, catalogs minor bugs in the licenses like typographical errors.

• Note that CC also released a version 2.1 suite for jurisdictions like Spain, Australia and Japan, whose localized ports of the 2.0 suite contained errors.

International License Development Processes

Released 2004-05-25. Changes explained at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216

License Suite Version Chart

Released 2005-06. Changes described at: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5447 and http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5457

Nomenclature (for unported licenses)

Released 2007-02-23. Version 3 explains the changes.

Technical measures by licensees prohibited

Version 3.01 was discussed 2007-10, work will be folded into a future version, possibly a version 3.5, proposed 2007-12, possibly a version 4.0 over a longer time period (3.01 and 3.5 are not now in active discussion and there may never be CC licenses with those version numbers).

Attribution to author required

Attribution to others contemplated

Requests for removal of attribution contemplated

Collecting societies regimes addressed

Representations and warranties by licensor included

"No endorsement" clause included

Moral rights clause included

Adaptations (if allowed) must be marked as such

Definition of "NonCommercial" unchanged (same in all versions)

Use of licenses for copyrightable compilations of data anticipated

Compatible licenses may be used for adaptations of works originally offered under CC ShareAlike licenses

Sui generis rights in data addressed