Law Students

brief ?CC-licensed specification? rant

By Luis

The next time I hear “we’ve licensed the specification under Creative Commons so anyone can implement the spec”, I’m going to scream at someone.¹

To take a list from a Microsoft license I read yesterday, implementing a spec may require (among other things) licensing of “pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark rights.” Putting a specification under a CC license gives you a copyright license to the text of the specification; it does not give license to the necessary trademarks, or to the patents, and depending on the license chosen, may not even give you the right to make a derivative work of the license (aka, the implementation.)

So, creative commons folks: could you please, please scream for me? Or better yet, work with SFLC to create a good license for specifications (since they aren’t happy with the OSP), and then ask people who’ve ‘cc licensed’ specifications to use that instead? KTHXBYE. :)

1. Yes, someone from MS did it today, but I don’t blame them- this is all confusing and they were trying hard to do the right thing.

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on March 27, 2008 (boomark / email).