Degender legal text of CC0-1.0

[oddhack]

Problem

CC0-1.0 refers to "he or she" in its text. This is not inclusive and may trigger tools used for automated checking of e.g. the AOSP Coding with Respect policies.

Description

Replace "he or she" with "they" or other gender-neutral pronoun, or rewrite the language more extensively to avoid pronouns.

Alternatives

Since we can't alter legal text of other people's licenses, working around this requires adding exceptions for license files (to the AOSP checker mentioned above).

Additional context

I'm not sure if this affects other CC-family license text but if it does, the same fix should apply.

(Edit: Also affects CC-PDDC, noted on #1149.)

Implementation

While this is a seemingly trivial edit, realistically I know this has to go through whatever IP lawyers CC uses to approve their licenses, and will take a long time even if stakeholders are receptive.

[mmoreshead]

I'd happily help with this if there's anything I can do.

[sarahpearson]

We are planning to update the errata page to include reference to this as an error in CC0. We will also update translation documentation to make it clear to translation teams that they should use gender neutral terminology when translating CC0 wherever possible.

In the long term, we have flagged this for future versions of CC0.

[ryancdotorg]

I've provided naively updated versions in a pull request. The translations should be updated where possible as well, but I'm unable to do that myself.

[oddhack]

Thanks for being so receptive to making this change! FWIW I took a look at other CC materials and commented in #1149.

[sarahpearson]

Updated errata page here: https://creativecommons.org/legal-code-errata/

[TimidRobot]

@sarahpearson The CC0 1.0 Universal - Creative Commons Legal Code does not yet include a link to the Legal code issues & errata - Creative Commons. I assume we want to put it after the translations notice (like we did for the Korean BY* 4.0 translation).

Screenshot of CC0 1.0 Universal translation notice:

[sarahpearson]

@TimidRobot, first of all, thank you so much for catching this because it makes me realize I forgot about this for the two recent corrected translations! I have now put the wheels in motion for that. (Portuguese, German)

On this one, the CC0 error is slightly different because so far, we haven't actually changed the legal code. Historically, for errors that we have not been able to correct, we have not added a link to the errata page. We can discuss with @peterspdx whether to change that policy in this unique situation. I'll add it to the Legal/Tech agenda.

[ryancdotorg]

Hey all, I was just wondering where we're at with this? No activity on it in about two years, and at least for the English version it seems like a straightforward change that everyone's agreed on.

[TimidRobot]

@ryancdotorg

In the long term, we have flagged this for future versions of CC0.

Changing the text of the legal code will require a new version of CC0. While the gendered language change is simple/obvious, releasing a new version of the legal code requires quite a bit more work (ex. License Stewardship Consultation - Google Docs).

As far as changing the legal code web page to link to the errata, I'll re-raise that in Legal-Tech (I had forgotten about it).

💛🤍💜🖤

[increasingawareness]

I'm curious if this is being worked on. Recently released a work on CC0 without realizing the gendered language is there. If the next version corrects this error, can I update it to the version without gendered language?

[ryancdotorg]

@increasingawareness Here's what I did: https://github.com/ryancdotorg/libsdsock/blob/main/LICENSE

I am not a lawyer, etc.