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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Attribution War
  • Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 12:49:10 -0400 (EDT)

Alice creates a song, licenses it CC-NC, and forgoes any
attribution requirements. Bob mixes Alice's song into
his own song, license his song CC-NC, and wants attribution.

Charlie puts Bob's song in his CC-NC movie short.

At the end of the movie, the credits roll, and you see

Screenplay : Charlie
Soundtrack : Bob

after all the credits roll, you see a screen dump
of all the copyright notices, including one for Alice.
If Charlie's movie uses metadata to carry copyright
notice information, then you wouldn't even see Alice's
name anywhere in the movie. It would simply tag along
in the metadata.

"you must ... give the Original Author credit reasonable
to the medium or means You are utilizing"

To me, this says attribution means you want to be listed
in teh movie credits alongside the actor's names, etc.
Apparently "reasonable to the medium or means" has legal
meaning that I don't know all the particulars about,
but that's how I read it.

"You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work"

There are no copyright notices in a song, it's in the
metadata or on the website where you download it.
So Charlie can put them on his website where people
download his movie or in the metadata for his movie.
He doesn't have to put it in the credits. Or if he
does, he can put it at the end in a screen dump.

I suppose this is all mute anyway, since my concern is
a major multi-contributer project having to cart around
an ever-accumulating mass of attribution clauses.
But I think the SCO lawsuit has forever changed multi-
contributer projects to require a huge file cabinet
of contributer warranties, and an audit trail of
who contributed what.

I'd just prefer Attribution to be "off" by default
and require authors turn it "on" explicitly.
That's how GNU-FDL handles its invariant sections.

If more formats and more editors handled copyright
notices embedded in the metadata, it would be a
lot easier to have automatic tools to keep track
of copyright notices for derived works rather than
requiring human intervention to be "reasonable".

who knows, my opinion may do a complete 180 when
I get my first movie short out. All I've ever done
that's libre content so far has been software and
a software training manual, and they have copyright
notices built into the medium.


















Evan Prodromou said:
>>>>>> "GL" == Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> writes:
>
> GL> By: is not the same as Copyright Notice.
>
> I'd dispute that pretty heavily. There's no other requirement to
> preserve copyright notices in the non-Attribution 1.0 license.
>
> I think tarring Attribution with the same brush as the "obnoxious BSD
> advertising clause" is a straw man argument. As Glenn pointed out,
> Attribution is much more flexible for distributors and derivers.
>
> ~ESP
>
> --
> Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>
> Wikitravel - http://wikitravel.org/en/
> The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide
> _______________________________________________
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>
>


--
"Impatient Perl" => Perl geek in about a week.
http://www.greglondon.com/iperl/index.html
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