Creative Commons is preparing to draft a new version of its eponymous suite of copyleft licenses. The aim of the update is to deliver improvements in key areas such as database rights and the definition of noncommercial use. The organization has launched a preliminary requirements-gathering effort to collect ideas and proposals from the Creative Commons community.

The Creative Commons licenses, which were originally published in 2002, have exploded in popularity and seen broad adoption. There are now hundreds of millions of individual works distributed under Creative Commons licensing terms. The new version of the licenses will be the fourth major revision.

The upcoming overhaul has prompted discussion about a wide range of topics. One issue of particular interest is the question of how to best accommodate international use of Creative Commons licenses. Although copyright law in most countries is based on a common a set of international treaties, the details of the implementation differ between countries.

Creative Commons has historically addressed that issue by fostering "ports" of its licenses. Each port is a regional variant that is drafted to conform with the policies of the jurisdiction-translating the underlying concepts of the license into specific legal principles that are applicable to the target country.

This approach has worked relatively well in practice, but poses some scalability challenges. The legal experts behind the individual ports can't always keep up with changes in the Creative Commons license. Some ports, for example, haven't been updated to version 3.0 yet. An alternative strategy that is attracting some interest suggests discontinuing the ports in favor of making the standard Creative Commons licenses internationally applicable.

Legal scholar Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh who represented Creative Commons last year in a presentation before WIPO's Committee on Development and Intellectual Property, wrote a blog entry last month that explains the porting issue in detail.

According to Guadamuz, there are now 550 Creative Commons licenses if you count all of the regional variations of the assorted Creative Commons license formulations. More significantly, he pointed out that a majority of international Creative Commons adopters are not using the ported versions anyway. He supports transitioning away from the porting model.

Another issue that could get a lot of attention during the update is database policy. In certain jurisdictions, there area categories of content that do not fall within the traditional boundaries of copyright but are still subject to a similar framework of intellectual property rights.

The European Union, for example, affords databases certain property rights that are functionally similar to copyright. One of the major goals for the version 4 update is to overhaul how Creative Commons licenses handle sui generis database rights (SGDRs). One proposal suggests treating SGDRs the same way as copyright. According to notes in the Creative Commons wiki, that change would address the major reason why the UK government has previously declined to use Creative Commons licenses.

Creative Commons says that the requirements gathering period that precedes the actual drafting of the license update will continue into February. They hope to have the new license finalized by the end of 2012. For additional details about how to participate, you can refer to the official statement recently issued by Creative Commons.