[cc-community] Does BY-SA extend to a newspaper?
Rob Myers
rob at robmyers.org
Mon Apr 23 15:29:19 EDT 2007
drew Roberts wrote:
> Ah, nope, I don't think that fully covers the situation. While a derivative
> work is a work that would attract its own copyright, it is not the only works
> that might incorporate or contain a BY-SA work and not be a derivative.
>
> Have you missed the talk on collections? (Collective works or whatever the
> correct terminology is.)
>
> A collective work canget a copyright on the collection. Right? Wrong?
I think so but people don't seem to always assert it. Does the work get
this automatically? How does it interact with the underlying copyright?
I can see the case that the collective work couldn't exist without the
underlying CC-licensed work so the condition for being allowed to claim
a collective copyright that covers the CC-licensed work is that the
collective work must be CC-licensed. I'm just very wary of it.
> Is a newspaper on the whole copyrighted? Or only the individual articles? Is a
> magazine copyrighted?
As a whole it is copyrighted by the publisher, there is usually a notice
on the contents page. Writers and illustrators and editors get
attribution. I must admit I haven't thought about what kind of copyright
this is. Photos from agencies must have their own copyright originally
and be licensed.
> The problem is that we only seek to control derivatives and we could also
> control copying and distribution where needed.
Stallman explicitly excluded collective works when drafting the GPL.
This was a tactical measure at least in part I believe, as no
Freeware/Shareware CD would have accepted those terms.
It is also important to avoid anything that could be regarded as coercion.
> Or am I totally off base.
No, I'm just very wary of collective copyright. Part of this is ethical,
part of this is due to my not having the best understanding of it. :-/
> I agree with that, but if we can do it using copyright law itself, might not
> that be better? Looking at this last paragraph, I think you might not fully
> get what Iam trying to say.
I understand the collective copyright argument but I think unless it is
used very precisely to enforce a particular part of a "social contract"
it could be seen as coercive and harm distribution without increasing or
protecting copyleft works.
I would be interested to see a study of how collective work copyrights
could interact with alternative copyright licenses though.
- Rob.
More information about the cc-community
mailing list