[cc-community] [cc-licenses] New Generic and ports

Rob Myers rob at robmyers.org
Sun Oct 8 17:53:07 EDT 2006


Andres are you on here? ;-)

Andres Guadamuz wrote:

> Peter has answered this really well, but let me add that I believe long 
> chains of derivatives as those that can be found in software are less 
> common in creative works. 

I agree with this in general but there are two cases that require a 
broad and shallow tree of derivatives across various jurisdictions:

- Over the next seventy or a hundred years there will be a lot of text, 
audio and video formats. People will need to translate their work 
between these formats.

- Studies done on Reggae "versions" show that a few key songs are 
covered or reworked many, many times. I assume this is also the case for 
other genres.

And one case that has chains so deep that the average Free Software 
project would get a bit nervous:

- Wikipedia and other wikis, where some pages have had thousands of 
edits and have now been copied to other web sites.

Culture is a long game but economic exploitation of culture is often a 
much shorter game. I think that most people who have tried to answer the 
question of how to make money from Free Culture have got it wrong to a 
greater or lesser degree, but it is a question that needs answering. 
I've written about this.

> Firstly, we must consider that there are a lot 
> of No Derivatives licensed material out there. Secondly, in my short and 
> limited experience looking at CC content and licences, I haven't 
> encountered a lot of actual inter-jurisdiction licence incompatibility 
> in existing licences. There have to be local differences, but these can 
> actually help in local interpretation even if the user is employing a 
> generic licence.

Definitely.

Watching the list discussing the drafting of the England & Wales license 
and then the drafting of the Scottish license helped clarify the 
licenses a lot for me. And the Creative Archive license drafting process 
meant I'd thought through the issues around BY-SA/FDL compatibility 
before that idea was raised.

- Rob.


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