Drupal 7 upgrade of creativecommons_lite

Great, congratulations with the new maintainership :-)
I think it would be practical to start by outlining the main differences between the following modules:

a) http://drupal.org/project/creativecommons_lite
(the perspectives for the D7 version of THIS module)

b) http://drupal.org/project/creativecommons
(which is in very bad shape right now, according to its issue queue)

and the lesser known, yet with brand new, 1.0 stable (?) version as of January 2013:

c) http://drupal.org/project/creative_commons
(cck field)

(And any more such CC modules, which I might be unaware of..?)

I just posted invitations to comment here on this issue, in the issue queues of the other two modules.

@darrellulm and @Leeteq, sorry I'm just now responding.

I FINALLY have some time and funding for this. I started a 7.2 branch of http://drupal.org/project/creativecommons a few months ago that merges the field approach @Ben Scott took in http://drupal.org/project/creative_commons with the more advanced API work @balleyne did for his Google Summer of Code project. We have a client project that is going to pay for @balleyne's help updating Creative Commons API support, but if we can pool resources from everyone who's doing something in this space I think we can develop something that is both easy to use AND supports true, legally binding CC licensing of assets in the CMS.

What became clear from the D6 version of that module is there was too much functionality in a single module/project... unfortunately creative_commons, creativecommons_lite, and the single CC license field Acquia added in Media Gallery have too little functionality "out of the box" and no easy way to expand. I've started consolidating CC related feature requests...

#2010960: Support Vimeo Style CC Searches w/ Exposed Filters
#2010978: Support mapping CC license with Feeds to Media Entity or Node
#1900556: Guiding widget suggestion

I also created a screencast beardcast describing the the way we've started populating large media libraries using Feeds. Hopefully it's obvious to anyone who's working with large media libraries why we need the license added at the file_entity level. Re-use of Media changes the where we want the license.

We have some client specific deliverables we have to meet for this update, but the more community support we get the more likely we'll end up with a single module that is easily installed by hiding the complexity of jurisdictions and user level license permissions with the option of more advanced configurations exposing that level of detail. We want a UIX that works for the 90%, but metadata that would still make librarians or lawyers happy. Community support isn't just developers capable of contributing to the code. Help with testing, UIX examples, use cases to consider, documentation, scheduling and promoting collaboration virtual meet-ups to discuss using Google Hangouts, taking and posting notes on these meetings... all of that enables developers to write more code.

This upgrade is going to happen regardless of the level the community participation over the next 30 days. We're not planning on writing any code this week so it gives you plenty of time to to post feature requests to https://drupal.org/project/creativecommons

FYI: I have asked for a status update in comment #11 over here:
#1558096: D7 Roadmap
- also related to @kreynen's comment #5 above here from last june.