[webmaven]

Many licenses (most especially the Creative Commons ones) have a plain language summary, but the summary doesn't supersede the actual license text (at most the summary can be a guide to the intent of the license if there is a dispute, but ideally licenses don't leave any wiggle-room for interpretation).

Licenses are legal documents, and the elaboration is required to make edge cases unambiguous to lawyers, and in extremis, to a court.