Using the works of others is a brick by brick process. It would be nice to have something that did it all for the licensee, but maybe the parts should be broken out (grant, warranty of reasonable inquiry) to be more practical for the wary casual writer. I wouldn’t want the fear of one mistake tainting a work make an important (in hindsight) author neglect to at least let their part of the work be copied without needing to negotiate with them or their heirs.

So some sort of warranty is crucial. If we can come up with a way to soften our current warranty without passing on too much risk to licensees, then I’d be open to doing so. (I have trouble imagining how this would be done, since, again, someone must bear the risk.) But the idea of removing any type of warranty whatsoever isn’t compatible with our goals.

“What good is the license?” What a surprising question.

Without the license, you can’t use the work. It’s as simple as that.

“Passing the risk on to the licensee, that seems unfair”?

No.

The licensee gets to use the work for free. Asking for any kind of guarantee on top of that seems to be somewhat cheeky. I, as someone who donates his works to the “Creative Commons”, have to assume uncalculable liability to an unknown number of anonymous licensees, to compensate them for their friendly willingness to use my work?

You must be joking. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay people even one dime for the privilege of having them use my works.

Glenn Otis Owen: “So some sort of warranty is crucial. If we can come up with a way to soften our current warranty without passing on too much risk to licensees, then I’d be open to doing so. (I have trouble imagining how this would be done, since, again, someone must bear the risk.) But the idea of removing any type of warranty whatsoever isn’t compatible with our goals.”

Your goals seem to be not compatible with mine as an author. The solution to that is easy. I have removed all reference to your licenses from all of my works, replacing them with (for the time being) “all rights reserved”.

The existing set of CC licenses does one kind of burden- and risk-allocation — if you see one of these licenses, you know you’re free to use the work on those terms and can hold the licensor accountable if the license’s assertions are negligent. But that’s not the right choice for every licensor.

I agree it would be valuable to have licenses that made the opposite choice too — a mere quitclaim that asserted only that the immediate licensor would not assert rights against one who followed his license terms. The no-warranty license would pass along the rights, and only those rights, that the licensor had to confer, leaving to each potential licensee the decision whether the work was “safe” for re-use. That license gives less assurance than the current CC set, but it removes one potential plaintiff from suit, so in many cases it’s better than no license at all.