[cc-licenses] Clarification for Non-Derivative License

David Chart bydosa at davidchart.com
Fri Jan 6 22:15:43 EST 2012


On 2012/01/06, at 5:11, Sarah Pearson wrote:

> The way the licenses currently work, the question of what constitutes a derivative/adaptation is determined by reference to local law. 

Which is, as you certainly know, a horrible, unclear mess in most jurisdictions. And, as other people have pointed out, "local law" is often not well-defined. (Even for me personally: I'm a UK citizen, legally and physically resident in Japan, with a website served from the USA. Local law is...?)

It might be a good idea to have an "avoidance of doubt" list that says what is and isn't a derivative work, although the list would have to be developed over time.

An idea might be to have a set of classes of changed works.

Class A would be changes of file format or equivalent, things that are really not changes as far as the work itself is concerned, but only for its binary representation.

Class B would be proofreading, spelling correction, straight translation, playing something as a soundtrack (unchanged), putting a picture in a book, greyscaling, colorising, and so on. Things that do change the work, but leave it the same work.

Class C would be full-on transformations.

Then the licenses could specify which classes of changes were permitted: none (must preserve binary equivalence), or any combination of the others. This would effectively permit BY-DO-SA, if you only permitted Class C, and released the work in physical form.

-- 
David Chart
http://www.davidchart.com/Blog/



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