[cc-licenses] Use cases for cc by-sa compatibility with GPL

Ben Finney bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au
Sun Jan 1 19:19:03 EST 2012


Anthony <osm at inbox.org> writes:

> On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 9:44 PM, Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab at web.de> wrote:
> > To cut my previous message short: Do you want cc by-sa to be the
> > definite copyleft license for free culture? Or do you want to force
> > people to use GPL for art when they create it for a free game, just
> > to be safe and to avoid restrictions on their project organization?
>
> I don't want to force people to do anything. If people want
> derivatives of their work to be used in GPL software, they should
> license their work under GPL.

The implication of this is that if the author of a graphic image or
audio file or text document does *not* license their work under GPL, it
is because they don't want recipients to combine the work into GPL
programs.

I disagree. Surely it is more likely that the licensor would have no
objection to such a derived work, but didn't think about the
incompatibility between CC ShareAlike and the GPL.

> GPL is not a bad license for software. But it's not a good license for
> photographs, or maps.

This thread is discussing use cases where that line is not clear.
Graphic images and audio and programs all combined into a single work;
the licenses need to be compatible.

That's why a solution is being sought to allow those works, whose
purposes *started* different, to be combined by recipients into a single
derived work under a single set of license terms, while still all being
free.

If the original licensors of each work wanted a sharealike, but one of
them made a program and another made a graphic image and another made an
audio file – it *is* a bug that a recipient does not have the freedom to
combine them into a single derived work and redistribute under free
license terms.

So what can be done to address that bug?

-- 
 \     “The Vatican is not a state.… a state must have territory. This |
  `\         is a palace with gardens, about as big as an average golf |
_o__)                         course.” —Geoffrey Robertson, 2010-09-18 |
Ben Finney



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