Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 10:08 +0200, Morten Wulff wrote:

> On my website I have a collection of pictures that are sometimes used by  
> journalists to accompany newspaper/magazine articles or TV news segments.
> 
> To avoid having to discuss legal stuff everytime someone wants to use one  
> or more of the pictures, I'm thinking of making them available under the  
> cc-by-sa license.

On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 13:20 +0100, Rob Myers wrote: 

> A polymorphic license might be good; the work would be free for 
> noncommerical use,
> or X dollars if you use it commercially. I suppose people might want to
> negotiate the price depending on the use context, though.

Bzzzt! Wrong answer. B-) He specifically was looking for a license where he 
wouldn't
have to do this.

Morten: any *-NonCommercial-* license is going to mean that you have to 
discuss
legal stuff everytime someone wants to use one or more of the pictures. 
Attribution-ShareAlike (by-sa) is the one you want.

To answer your question about ShareAlike and commercial use: there should be
no problem with it. Some people argue that ShareAlike is not friendly to
commercial use. Commercial users can't make quite as much money off of
ShareAlike stuff as people who have exclusive control of a work.

But if a commercial user isn't trying to make a fortune off the pictures
they got for free from you, there's nothing inherent in ShareAlike to make
it not work for businesses.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>