[cc-community] Identi.ca - my new Creative-Commons-enabled microblogging service
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Jul 7 21:54:55 EDT 2008
drew Roberts wrote:
> One of the problems I see is actually quoting something from outside of the
> system.
> I have a song lyric, three verses and a chorus. License; cc BY-SA.
>
> Over time, I end up quoting the whole thing but only ever one line at a time.
> So single lines are BY but the song is BY-SA. Can someone take all of the BY
> licensed lines and treat the song as BY?
These are actually general conceptual problems with copyright, they
apply to pretty much all works. E.g. suppose I give you a work under the
By-SA license. By a startling coincidence it happens to contain all of
the words of "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke, just in a
different order. Now, you have the right to derive works from the work I
have given you, but by the license, you must apply my license and
attribution to it. In principle, you could, through a series of
modifications recover "Rendezvous with Rama" from my text (actually the
same words coincidence isn't even necessary for this). If you do, does
my license cover it?
Of course not.
There is some point at which the modifications to the work exceed the
"20% rule" or whatever the local jurisdiction recognizes: it's just not
the same work anymore.
And there's no way to make that rigidly absolute -- it's always going to
be a judgment call.
In your example, you are making "fair use" quotes from a copyrighted
work, each of which is legal because of how you have used it. But if you
then assemble those to create the original work, that is still covered
by the original copyright. The fact that you licensed your works "By"
when they quoted material without a license, doesn't change that.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
More information about the cc-community
mailing list