[cc-community] Question about Share Alike

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Sat Aug 30 23:03:26 EDT 2008


drew Roberts wrote:
> I would 
> like to hear of real world uses where the SA part of BY-SA kicked in and did 
> something a simple BY would not have in the realm of photos.

Okay, here's one:

I was writing up a piece about images of artificial intelligence and
artificial life in fiction, and I wanted to create several illustrations
to go along with it. Due to the format of the publication, it was
awkward to use lots of separate illustrations, and a smaller number of
composed images made more sense.

Most of the images were free-licensed (as my article text was going to
be). However, I was making pop culture references, and it was obvious
that it was appropriate to include some screencaps of SF shows featuring
AI/AL characters. These were, of course, according to the same sort of
fair use rationale that Wikipedia uses (low res, quoted for review
purposes, etc).

I went so far as to compose an illustration which consisted of a set of
screenshots, and some other elements into a background shot of an image
which was essentially of "Gepetto's workshop" from "Pinocchio" (not the
Disney version, just a composed photo of wooden puppets in a workshop).

Then I realized that the workshop shot was a By-SA image. Ack! The
composition was, of course, a license-violation, because I didn't have
rights to the screencaps I was using, and obviously couldn't license
them By-SA.

In the end, I substituted a public domain illustration from an old
edition of the Pinocchio story to play the same role (I also never
actually published the piece at all, but for completely unrelated reasons).

But I felt a little burned by that, and I realized that there were
situations where the "SA" could be burdensome.

Much _more_ irritating, though, were when I was in a similar situation,
except the elements were licensed GPL or FAL and I wanted to combine
them with By-SA elements.

Of course, in any of these cases, I could've sought special permission
from the photographer, but I didn't attempt it. It was generally easier
to just find a non-copyleft image that would do the trick.

Don't know if that helps or not, but that's my story.

Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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