Downstream relicensing

Rob Myers robmyers at mac.com
Wed Mar 9 08:14:35 EST 2005


On Wednesday, March 09, 2005, at 12:45PM, drew Roberts <zotz at 100jamz.com> wrote:

>I think the confusion is arising because if you choose SA then it says the 
>derivatives must carry exactly the same license, 

Under SA you have to offer derived work under the same license in order to get the license to use the original work.

Under not-SA you do not have to offer derived work under the same license in order to get the license to use the original work.

BUT the work you have derived from is still protected by the CC license.

SO all ~SA means is that you can (~NC) sell the derived work or (NC) perform/print/show it without having to offer the part of it that you have created under CC (I think). It doesn't give you any magical rights to relicense the part of the originally licensed work that your derived work contains under an incompatible license.

Intention doesn't help here. If you are trying to make NC work ~NC, you are using the work towards commercial advantage. Just not your own.

If the language of the license suggests that a grandchild attack (get, relicense, then relicense again) could work then it should be clarified, but I don't think that it does. 

Puhlease could someone from CC chime in on this? :-)

- Rob.



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