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cc-eyebeam - Re: [cc-eyebeam] more from Creative Commons

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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: jippolito AT guggenheim.org
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-eyebeam] more from Creative Commons
  • Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:23:12 -0500 (EST)


> This winter we're offering two new...Sampling Licenses
Glenn, I'm interested in where you see the tradeoff in license options versus
license complexity. I think it was shrewd to begin with a basic set of four
options when your licenses were new to the creative public--and maybe that's
still the face you should show artists who are new to the commons concept.

Nevertheless, there are important communities who will need more specialized
open licenses. Artist-made software is an increasingly important proportion
of contemporary art, from Internet art to interactive installations; yet the
current CC licenses explicitly don't apply to software, on the assumption
(I've been told) that the GPL (<A
Href="http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html";
target="_blank">http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html</A>) should suffice.
Of course the GPL works great for applications, but not necessarily for
art--leaving digital artists in a kind of legal no-man's-land when it comes
to open licenses.

We tried to adopt the CC license model for The Pool--an environment for
fostering collaborative digital art to be featured in week 4--but in the end
we chose to extend the CC schema by adding three new options:

1) The "Recombinant" option is analogous to the "Open source" requirement of
the GPL, which has no equivalent in current CC licenses. Recombinacy applies
to more than lines of code, however; it requires all source file/s to remain
accessible to the public. For example, a song created with a music editor
like Fruityloops must be released in both its final (mp3) and source (.flp)
formats; similarly a Flash movie must be accompanied by a .fla and a jpeg by
a .psd. This license option bears some resemblance to the Design Science
License (<A Href="http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt";
target="_blank">http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt</A>).

The second and third are variations of CC's "No derivatives" license,
obliquely related to the sampling licenses you referred to above:

2) "No Combinations" means that the artifact cannot be incorporated into or
combined with other artifacts in the same or other media. For example, a song
with this restriction cannot be used as the soundtrack to a video.

3) "No Transformations" means that the artifact cannot be distorted or
re-edited in its original medium. If the creator hasn't also selected 'no
combinations,' the song may nevertheless be combined with other artifacts as
long as it can still be extricated in its original form. For example, a song
under these conditions may be reused as the soundtrack of a video, but not as
a background track whose tempo, pitch, or instrumentation are modified.

So far these license options seem to work for our community--but we are
sensitive to the danger of flooding the Internet with a Babel of competing
license schemes. Do you recommend that communities with diverse needs
petition CC to add new options? Or would it be better to use techniques like
RDF to create semantic crosswalks between divergent schemes, so that
intelligent search engines could interpret across them?

Any legal or technical pointers would be really appreciated--we're all new at
this "business" <img src="images/icons/icon7.gif" alt=":)" border=0
align='absmiddle'>

jon




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