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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Clarification needed - Copyleft AND Share-Alike with Images

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Clarification needed - Copyleft AND Share-Alike with Images
  • Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 09:15:08 -0500

On Monday 19 February 2007 02:08 pm, Fred Benenson wrote:
> Let me chime in as another BY-SA photographer who was once unclear about
> what SA meant for photos in text. I shoot a lot of concert photography
> (see http://flickr.com/photos/fcb/sets/72157594528416158/
> and http://flickr.com/photos/fcb/sets/72157594517541236/ for recent sets)
> and have recent signed contracts for the commercial rights of some shots
> for worldwide distribution in music magazines through an international
> agency. My assumption was that the agency a) didn't notice or bother to
> understand the terms of BY-SA licenses on my photos and b) wanted a higher
> resolution version of the photos for print, so they went ahead and "asked"
> for my permission. Which is fine. They tell me I should be getting a
> royalty check on the 15th of every month.
>
> Anyway, I've been specifically avoiding the NC licenses for the various
> complications which I'm sure you're all aware of, but at the end of the
> day, I've still got a sliver of worry about blatant commercial
> redistribution of work based on my photos with only an attribution given in
> return, so maybe I'm with Wolfgang on this. Perhaps, you might say, Fred's
> just not totally comfortable with the terms of BY-SA and should use NC
> instead, but my justification for my worry here is because I do feel as if
> there's a bit of a disconnect in possible reward of authoring a copy left
> photo vs. authoring copy left software.
>
> This is a worry that has been brought to my attention often by many people
> who understand both the values of the free software world AND the realities
> of the cultural world: the GPL represents terms that are now unquestionably
> attractive to coders, whereas the the attractiveness of licensing BY-SA is
> still unclear to photographers and artists, to say the least. So how do we
> get the photography, art, music, whatever, community to have the
> conversations so that they are comfortable with the BY-SA terms? Are there
> better terms that they might be happier with? Unfortunately, and I think
> this is Mike's point, even assuming we can have those conversations, it is
> not clear that we'll be able to come to any better terms than those that
> are already in BY-SA simply because the notion of "derivative" is
> interpreted differently in different kinds of works.
>
> So is our goal going to be to re-align the values of the photography
> community by telling them that attribution is simply *enough* of a reward
> if TIME Magazine starts reusing their work? It doesn't seem like we have
> any other options given the realities of what BY-SA protects.

I think the option is to reword BY-SA so that it protects more.
>
> While I'm pretty sure I (as well as other free culture supporters) can and
> have certainly convinced ourselves that attribution from TIME is enough of
> a reward;

Actually, I, for one, have not convinced myself of this and nore do I wish to
try and do so. We need these conversations as far as I am concerned. Even
going so far as to consider if BY-SA needs to not allow mere aggregation if
that is what it will take.

> it seems as if it might be an uphill battle within the
> royalties-based photography community. That's a reality we, as people who
> care about preserving free culture, need to realize.
>
> And what if photographers never bite? 25 Million photos on Flickr is a
> wonderfully successful metric, but I'm worried BY-SA isn't enough of an
> incentive to initiate the kind of movement (some would call it a
> revolution) inside the photography community that the GPL initiated inside
> the software community. The GPL spoke to freedoms that software
> programmers felt from the day they started writing their own software, but
> does BY-SA do the same for photographers? What happens if we find that the
> freedoms elucidated by "copy left" are inherently not as meaningful or
> rewarding in cultural works as they are in software source: what do we do
> then? This question keeps me up at night.

I for one and ready to spend some time in this discussion if other's are
interested.
>
>
> Anyway, for now I'm sticking with the kludge of uploading only
> low-resolution web versions of my photos....

You might be interested in the plan I started to work on with the images here:

http://www.ourmedia.org/user/17145

I got side tracked from this experiment and have not gotten back to it to try
and fine tune it and see if it can really work.
>
>
>
>
> Fred Benenson
> http://www.fredbenenson.com

all the best,

drew
>
> On 2/16/07, wolfgang wander < wwc AT lns.mit.edu> wrote:
> > Peter Brink wrote:
> > > wolfgang wander skrev:
> > >> Now looking at this FAQ - it requires 'a collection of works in their
> > >> exact original format, not adaptations'. In my view:
> > >>
> > >> * any print of a digital image is an adaptation and
> > >> certainly not the original format.
> > >> * any editorial use of my full size image (it has
> > >> to be scaled, maybe cropped) is an adaptation
> > >> and certainly neither one is the original format.
> > >>
> > >> Even this very much hidden-from-view FAQ would very clearly exclude
> > >> editorial use of my images.
> > >
> > > No. It very clearly does not. An adaptation is a transformation of a
> > > work, a translation being the classic example. Copies are not
> > > adaptations. If you scan an picture and create a digital image of that
> > > picture you create a copy. This follows from how that concept (copying)
> > > is defined in copyright law. cropping and scaling are not
> > > transformative enough for the end result to become an adaptation.
> >
> > Now Peter - this may be very clear to you as you are used the the
> > language of copyright licenses. For me as a lay person a resized
> > or printed version of my original jpg file is everything but original
> > format.
> >
> > If the above FAQ is the only clarification that Creative Commons
> > provides so that I as a licensor can make an informed decision
> > about cc-by-sa it is not sufficient by any means.
> >
> > For a lay person's reading of this paragraph I would consider the FAQ
> > entry misleading at best.
> >
> > > CC's licenses (as does all open source/open content licenses) build
> > > upon copyright law. They do not extend nor do they expand the scope of
> > > protection allowed under copyright law (which would be the case if your
> > > interpretation was correct). The distinction btw adaptation and copying
> > > is not one created by this community it follows from the common usage
> > > of those concepts in copyright law.
> >
> > I begin to understand that now. CC is however not doing a good job when
> > it talks about the concepts of Share-Alike. My intention as a content
> > creator was to license my work so that sites that publish their content
> > under a similar license (most notably the wiki family) could use my work
> > but that my work cannot be used for a free ride to increase the value of
> > non-free editorial content. The side effect is that you seem to make
> > wikimedia the worlds largest gratis stock photography agency.
> >
> > Conceptually:
> > Without licensing my work under a CC or alike license I hold the
> > exclusive rights to my work. Now I can certainly grant another person
> > the rights to copy my work, either for free or for money. And I can
> > certainly do this for any number of people. Now why isn't it possible
> > to come up with a license that defines this group of people as those
> > who are willing to combine my work with Free content only?
> >
> > Wolfgang
> > _______________________________________________
> > cc-licenses mailing list
> > cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses

--
(da idea man)




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