[cc-community] Compatibility of CC licenses between jurisidictions?

Paul Houle paul at ontology2.com
Tue Jul 6 13:25:43 EDT 2010


    Here's another practical problem.

    Let's suppose I'm writing a blog article (for the sake of argument,  
I'm based in the US )and I'm incorporating photographs that I've gotten 
from other sources.

    If the photographs are cc-by-{country} it seems like there's no 
problem if I attribute correctly.

    Now,  if the photographs are cc-by-sa-{country},  I'm a little more 
concerned.  Is cc-by-sa-{country} compatible with cc-by-sa unported?  
What issues are involved?

    When I look at wikipedia I see that wikipedia as a whole is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License

    but I can find photos in wikimedia commons that are in specific 
country licenses,  for instance:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presa_chira_gran_canaria.JPG

    which is used on the page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Canaria

    of course there are also strange examples such as

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dingzhou_Liaodi_Pagoda_3.jpg
 
    which has contradictory statements on the page,  but contains the 
particularly strange assertion that "Multi-license with GFDL and 
Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.5 and older versions (2.0 and 1.0)"

-----

    Which then begs the question,  suppose I'm running a photo 
collection site,  say something like

http://carpictures.cc/

    what do I have to tell the users?  Can I just "relicense" the images 
as cc-by-sa/3.0 "unported" or do I have to code each and every possible 
license and explain them to end users?



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