The problem of dealing with derived works has existed from the
very beginning. From the very first days of the Open Publication License in 1998 I've had long debates over it with dozens of people. Many authors and creators worry about how derivative works will affect their reputations.
I have always thought the best we can do is require people who produce derivative works to provide a link to the original work, and briefly describe the nature of the changes they have made. This empowers people to check for themselves to see what is changed, and I really think is the best we can do. In thinking about this problem, I believe there is an opportunity for us to address one of the primary practical problems with the way CC licenses are used.
Creative Commons Licenses now all use the attribution clause, which reads as follows:
"You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor."
Problematically, almost no one bothers to specify "the manner in which they wish to be attributed." People just slap the CC badge on their website (which visually tells the user nothing because the same badge is used for By as is used for By-NC-ND, but there seems to be little interest in solving this problem). Because people don't specify how they want to be attributed, much of the power of the CC licenses are lost.
It occurs to me that it might be useful to create a repository of Attribution "Plugins" - several bits of standard language describing how people wish to be attributed. Imagine something like the following:
If reusing or distributing this work in its original, unaltered form, you must include the following Attribution language:
These materials are copyright (c) Some Body, 2006 and are
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 2.5
or later. For more information about the license, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ This work was
originally downloaded from [URL GOES HERE].
If reusing or distributing this work in an altered, transformed, or
derived form, you must include the following Attribution language:
These materials are copyright (c) [YOUR NAME GOES HERE], [DATE] and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 2.5 or later. For more information about the license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
These materials were based on other materials that are copyright (c)
Some Body, 2006 and are also licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 2.5 or later. For more
information about the license, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ The original materials
on which this work was based were downloaded from [URL GOES HERE]. The
nature of the changes made to the work are as follows; [PROVIDE A
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE CHANGES MADE TO THE ORIGINAL MATERIALS].
This example plugin (or something like it) could be one of many that lives in a CC attribution plugin repository. Working through what the architecture for the different plugins might be interesting. In the same way that CC allows you to choose non-commercial, sharealike, or no-dervis, the repository might allow you to choose state-authors-name or not, point-to-original, distribute-original-with, briefly-describe-changes, etc. Three or four attribution options could be permutated to create a handful of standard attribution plugins. People could then license their material CC-By+AttibutionPlugin-AuthorName-PointToOriginal-DescribeChanges, or such.