[cc-licenses] Regarding SA and "strong copyleft" question

teun spaans teun.spaans at gmail.com
Wed Feb 28 00:36:44 EST 2007


Cite:Interesting to see however how you 'know' in your head what they or we
are thinking...

There is no kindreading needed when, as happened, people actually complain
about commercial reuse, as the name of the license suggested to them.

i wish you health and happiness
teun spaans

On 2/28/07, wolfgang wander <wwc at lns.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> Now now Terry,
>
> > Also, I expect to create By-SA content commercially as much as I can get
> > away with, and I have serious doubts about someone with the sorts of
> > motivations you envision being happy with that. The fact that I'm making
> > money, partly enabled by their content is going to piss them off, if
> > they really have this "I'm giving to charity" and "I don't want to
> > undercut commercial competition" idea in their heads. If that's what
> > they are thinking, then they are really thinking in terms of NC, not SA
> > licensing.
>
> I suppose this is meant to hit close to home. And I'm sorry if that sets
> the tone of my reply...
>
> Let me just state this:
>
> People chose SA over NC and this should be the only measure you
> should apply as to what they have in their heads.
>
> While Creative Commons avoids explaining the issues concerning mixing
> images and text, they are very clear about the fact that CC-by-SA
> allows commercial re-use.  So People choosing SA know full well that
> their content can be used commercially.  Commercial use is fine - as long
> as Share-Alike and BY rules are followed.
>
> Interesting to see however how you 'know' in your head what they or we
> are thinking...
>
> It's easy to insinuate sinister motives to discredit other arguments, easy
> but maybe not effective...
>
> Its as easy to point out the hypocrisy for melodramatically
> threatening to abandon CC if they ever consider to publish any license
> other than 'CC-BY':
>
> > A creator is always, in a game theoretic sense going to
> > be motivated to seek more and more control. But that's not what we're
> > supposed to be about here (or if it is, then I have to abandon CC
> entirely).
>
> and moments later that same person explains to us that he needs non-Free
> all-about-control 'Verbatim-Only' licenses:
>
> > The articles are usually By-SA, but I occasionally use a
> > "Verbatim Only" license. The latter is useful if the article is very
> > precisely stating an opinion which may be controversial and which I
> > don't want misrepresented.
>
> Yet again a few sentences later he claims that not being able to
> combine any given text with any given image is 'muzzling free
> speech!'.
>
> Wait!?! A 'Verbatim Only' license does NOT do this?  What if my free
> speech evolves about making my points using your words out of context?
>
> > But uh-oh, according to your plan, I'm in a deadlock. I have By-SA and
> > ARR photos in one article. Can't publish. You've muzzled my free speech
> > rights!  And remember, my article text is normally under By-SA anyway.
>
> Sorry - couldn't resist...
>
> But lets not go there any further,  instead lets try to clarify some of
> your other
> arguments:
>
> > If we were to apply the suggested rule, then we would have the shocking
> > case where I can use copylefted material under "fair use" in an ARR
> > work, but I *can't* use ARR work under fair use in a copylefted work!
>
> Sorry - I'm not following you here.  Can't you already now use
> copy-lefted material in an ARR work?  Wasn't the whole discussion about
> an ARR text using copy-lefted images and declaring the whole product to
> be ARR?
>
> ... or for that matter taking any by-SA text (your blog for example) and
> combining it with an ARR image to make the complete aggregation ARR?
>
> > Remember when the CSS folks were suing people for merely *linking* to
> > pages describing or providing DeCSS? That's almost certainly a "semantic
> > link" (and from a software perspective, it is nearly identical to the
> > way an image is identified from HTML code -- the text and picture do not
> > actually come together except within the user's browser. No "copy" of
> > the combined work is ever actually made!
>
> A little far fetched - to stay with your evil-doer analogy, one
> would have to inline (maybe per HTML-frame or such) the DeCSS code
> into the text describing it, pretty much like adding an image via <img
> src> to existing text.
>
> Or to transform the analogy to the other side, nobody I know has any
> problems linking (<a href>here</a>, rather than <img src>) cc-by-sa
> images from ARR text.
>
> > Then there's the question of transformative use. If you take a really
> > nice picture of a fork, it may be a wonderful work in its own right, but
> >  if I make a clever pun in my article about "forking" a project, and use
> > the fork picture as the punchline, do you really feel that my work is
> > sufficiently dependent on your authorship that you should have the right
> > to tell me how to license my work?
>
> Absolutely!  By using it *you* make it dependent.  You, not the
> photographer creates the dependence.  It should be easy enough for you
> to find another fork picture to make the same clever pun.
>
> Likewise, when I want to use your by-SA article and have my own ARR
> picture of an even nicer fork, should I or shouldn't I be able to take
> your article, semantically link it with my fork image to create ARR
> content?
>
> > You all are right of course, that there is a negative consequence to be
> > found here in that people may suddenly decide to retract commercial
> > quality By-SA work. But you know what? In my experiences on Flickr, I
> > find that much of the *best* photography is actually under the "By"
> > license. So I don't think it's as big of a threat as you make it out to
> be.
>
> As I've said before: Many Flickr users and most photographers I've
> talked to who published under CC-by-SA have been 'tricked' (to use
> your words) by the Share Alike term in the license.  Just search
> Flickr's forums for people's interpretation of this license.  Of all
> the feedback I had regarding this issue - once people understand the
> limited Share-Alike-ness - very few seem willing to license further
> content under this CC-by-Like license.
>
> > And as for your wanting to trick or pressure people into making their
> > content free-licensed, I think that is seriously wrong-headed. There are
> > enough good reasons to create free-licensed content, and enough of us
> > doing it everyday anyway, that it's not going to go away. Free licensed
> > images help to enable that content by providing freely distributable
> > images to go along with freely distributable articles.
>
> And this is exactly what cc-by-sa publishing photographers intended, It's
> the non-free ARR articles and by no means your CC-by-SA blog we are
> worried about.
>
> > The fact that
> > there are also some edge case free-rider situations is really a pretty
> > minor problem, in my opinion, and it simply isn't worth all of the
> > problems it would create.
>
> It is a growing problem though.  So far Share Alike was interpreted by
> most as referring to the editorial content that goes with the images
> as well. And so far - when I gave ARR content providers *my*
> interpretation of the Share Alike clause they removed these images or
> negotiated other license terms.  But after getting to know Creative
> Commons interpretation of Share Alike this will no longer be possible.
>
> Coming back to the original question:
>
> Some photographers want a means to contribute to Free projects like
> Wikipedia without ARR projects taking their content and using it in a
> very Share-Un-Alike manner.
>
> Given the current state of the license this is not possible.
>
> The question really boils down to:
>
> a) do you want to alienate these photographers who want to contribute
>     to Free projects while keeping the ARR content providers happy,
>     i.e. leave everything it is now.
>
> b) or do you want to level the playing field, invite more Free
>     thinking people to the table and ask ARR providers to either
>     join the game or find other sources of content?
>
> I'm very well aware of the fact that going from a) to b) will take
> some effort and there are many hurdles to overcome which you list
> carefully (and I even more carefully tend to ignore ;-) but unless the
> consensus is here that a) is the better solution Creative Commons
> should IMHO try see if there is such a path...
>
>         Wolfgang
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