Development of Creative Commons licenses

[email AT greglondon.com]

> On 8 Feb 2004, at 17:28, Luke Stodola wrote:
> > The NoDerivs clause also falls strongly into the first category.  If
> > you are putting your work in that central pool, you are granting others
> > the right to be inspired by them, adapt them, translate them, etc.  If
> > you simply want others to hear your work and then buy your CD, fine,
> > but don't mistake that for free or open content.

I may have been a little severe in reducing the
licenses to CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-ND-NC

I think NoDerivatives can work in the commons to some extent.
My experience is from software, where compiling source code
into an executable program is creating a derived work. The
GNU-GPL uses this to force any source code compiled together
with GNU-GPL source code to all be GNU-GPL. you cannot compile
GNU-GPL source code wtih anything else.

I think this is a little severe, since the actual sweat and blood
you put in your source code is not taken out of the public commons
by someone compiling their proprietary code with yours.

I don't know if there is a "compile" equivalent with music
or artwork or movies. If there is NOT, then you could have
a NoDerivatives on a photo, but someone could include that
in a coffee-table book of other photos. Songs could be placed
verbatim on a CD collection. This is usually called "aggregating",
putting a bunch of works in one location, but the act of doing 
so does not qualify as >creating a derived work< of the individual
pieces.

The open source initiative allows for NoDerivative licenses
as long as the license allows for "patch files" to be included
with the original work. You take the original unmodified work
and a patch file that says "replace line 159 with this 'blah blah'"
and run both of them through a program that creates a derived work.

It may be tough to word this in a music or art license, but
NoDerivedWork licenses that allow some kind of "patch" file
should be OK. I just don't know if it is possible to create
such a license.

saying NoDerivedWorks is not as much of a contribution to
the public commons as ShareAlike, which allows derivatives.
But sometimes there is a point to maintaining the artist's
original intent of a work. A work that has some
strong political or religious expression that the author
wants to convey and doesn't want to get watered down
by "mainstream" channels that modify it to more 'suitable'
standards comes to mind. 

Wasn't there some video chain that was recently offering 
modified versions of movies you coudl rent that had the 
swearing voiced-over and similar modifications to make 
the movies 'family-friendly'? Some people might not want 
that done to their work.

as long as you can "aggregate" a NoDerivative work into
other works and other mediums, it could still be part of
the public commons that other people can use and sell and
put to work.

It's not as 'libre' as ShareAlike, but I'm not so sure
it should be completely removed.

Greg