[cc-community] Re: morguefile

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Sat Jan 1 11:11:53 EST 2005


Rob Myers said:
> On 31 Dec 2004, at 14:38, Greg London wrote:
>> Rob Myers said:
> It's important to note that the image is licensed via the website
> *only* to individuals or organisations who directly download the work.
> The license doesn't follow the image like a CC licenses would.

CC-Sampling would prohibit redistribution of the original work.
That's about as close as you can get to the no-redistribution agreement
in a CC license.

> Apart from the no-redistribution aspect of the license, BSD-revised
> would be a good fit, which would best be matched by CC-BY(attribution
> waived).

Apart from? How do you waive "no redistribution" so lightly?
The whole point is to allow photographers control of their originals.
A photographer could license their photo CC-Sampling and post their photo.
Later, because of a commercial deal with some publisher, they
could take down the original. If the photo is CC-Sampling and they
take down the original photo, the original photo should not exist
anywhere on the web, and the photographer could sell exclusive rights
to the original photograph to someone.

Since no one can distribute the original, the photographer has
complete control over its availability.

> IMHO CC-SM-AD doesn't reproduce the original language:
> it allows free circulation,

CC-Sampling does not allow free circulation of the original.
CC-Sampling-Plus allows non-commercial circulation of the original.

> doesn't allow use of the entire image,

I think that's implied in the original agreement.
If redistribution of the original photo is allowed
because it is part of a larger derived work,
then the original photo is still redistributed,
and that breaks the original agreement.

> and requires attribution.

The aggreement says "photographers maintain credit".
I think attribution would most closely honor the idea of "credit".

> And a CC-SM-AD licence's terms would be
> self-contradictory:  you could not use the images as part of an
> advertisement, as unless it was a text-free "teaser" campaign you would
> be making a derivative work of the entire image that is not highly
> transformative.

I'll leave it to the ad people to figure out a way to use
CC-SM-AD photos in a way that is transformative enough to
satisfy the requirements of the license. They're pretty
smart when the concentrate.

The most important thing, though, is to find a license
that keeps most of morguefile's contributers happy by
matching the original agreement as closely as possible to
a CC license. And I think CC-SM-AD does that.

If they want to allow whole photos to be used as part of
a larger derivative work, then maybe there should be a
CC-Collage license specifically for photos and artwork.
It would allow an entire photo to be used in a derived
work if that new work sufficiently added an artistic
transformation to the final work. And CC-Collage could
allow advertising, and then they'd have a perfect fit.





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