[cc-community] Not sure does cc apply to a copy or 'original' work
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Sun Jun 1 15:06:08 EDT 2008
drew Roberts wrote:
> The cc license is to the work and not to an instance of the work.
But what is the "work" in this case? One does not copyright ideas, but
only expressions of those ideas. The idea of an image is NOT the work,
because the idea is not copyrightable.
Thus, some particular image IS the work.
If it is the high-resolution JPEG, then all derivatives, whether trivial
(crops or size-downs) or non-trivial (including size-ups, mosaics, etc)
are clearly going to be covered by a By-SA license, either because they
do not create a "new work", or because the SA forces derivatives to use
the same license.
If, however, it is only the low-resolution JPEG that is so licensed --
which is a derivative of the original (an abridgement, to be more
precise), then that version, and derivatives thereof would fall under
the By-SA license, but the high-resolution work would not be.
I think it is wrong to imagine that these are "the same work", because
it is not possible to recover the high-res work from the low-res work.
Thus, I would say that, IF the license on the high-res work is By-SA,
that the low-res work must be covered by it. However, the reverse should
not be true. Reductions in size are irreversible, because they lose
information.
> The law does not consider the low-res and the high-res photos seperate
> copyrightable works but rather one work.
I think there's a fundamental difference between reducing an image or
its sampling rate and increasing it.
> Hence, when you get a license to that work as defined by law, you have a
> license to that work, no matter what form you happen to get a copy of it in.
>
> If I remember correctly, I have been given both opinions rather forcefully
> here on one of the lists I watch (licenses and community) at different times
> in the past.
Yeah. Me too.
> I think it might be worth finding some resolution to this and putting it in a
> faq,
As a lawyer would probably point out, there's no way for it to be really
resolved until it comes to court.
> drew
>> Dual-licensing software enterprises like MySQL also take advantage of the
>> fact that these permissions do not flow the way I think people are saying
>> they do. It's not as if MySQL's commercial version is automatically GPL'd
>> because MySQL ships related (but not identical - indeed, lesser) code that
>> is GPL'd. Instead, this is the crux of dual licensing, and CC licenses
>> are non-exclusive, so they can take part in a dual licensing regime.
That's an interesting way of looking at it -- it could be that that is a
precedent for supporting the separate license opinion.
Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, so I really can't do anything but express an
non-professional opinion on this.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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