[cc-community] Does BY-SA extend to a newspaper?
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Apr 23 17:22:25 EDT 2007
Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> <quote who="Terry Hancock" date="Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 04:29:17PM -0500">
>>As things stand we have a situation with some admitted faults -- it may
>>be a little *too* free.
>
> Weaker copyleft in this regards seems to lead people to license their
> works under NC terms in situations where, if it were software or another
> type of creative word, they would not.
Perhaps true, though we have no experimental control on that observation.
>>But trying to sew up the loopholes is going to cause problems, and I'm
>>not convinced that the cure wouldn't be worse than the disease.
>
> I'm not convinced either. But I am quite sure it is an issue that is
> important enough that's its worth thinking hard about. Thanks for doing
> some of the hard work toward that end.
Well, I'm not totally convinced of the opposite either. It could be that
one of these proposals is reasonable.
I've been thinking that such a proposal *in combination* with a proposal
to introduce standardized licensing fees and terms for clear copyrights
on By-SA works in commercial-proprietary container works might solve a
lot of people's problems with the present situation.
The truth is, what I object to is the extra web of dependency checking
that binding containing works would impose, and the possibility of a
"mine" going off (like a single author who decides to try to block the
work either by refusing permission or asking for ridiculously high fees,
thus forcing me to rework to eliminate their work). If that part at the
same time got much simpler and less risky, then the idea of having to
clear By-SA works becomes a lot more attractive.
I'm both a producer and a consumer of By-SA licensed visual works. As a
consumer I'm bothered by the risk factors and "chilling effects" of such
an extension to the copyleft. OTOH, as a producer I can appreciate the
motivations. To me it's a question of striking a fair balance (as are
most situations in this arena). If the By-SA introduced an extra rights
clearing requirement into the existing situation, but also made all such
rights-clearing activities simpler and less risky, then it might
actually come out to a win for everybody.
This might even solve the NC problem for many of us (if for example,
there were a registry where you could look up any CC-By-NC work and
determine what fee would be asked for licensing to CC-By-SA, or what
would be required for incorporation into a larger proprietary work --
the latter service is provided by Magnatune, for example, but not the
former).
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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