[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