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cc-licenses - Re: Does CC-SA require a modifiable copy?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Does CC-SA require a modifiable copy?
  • Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 11:10:20 +0000

On Tuesday, November 30, 2004, at 09:51AM, Ricardo Gladwell
<president AT freeroleplay.org> wrote:

>However, as I have argued before, by publishing content in closed,
>proprietary formats you can also restrict the free flow of ideas. In the
>case of Brand X proprietary word processor, whilst it may be legal to
>only publish content in this format under the CCPL, the format itself
>may not be open and thus it may be difficult if not impossible to use
>the content unless you pay a large ammount of money for the application.

This is true, however there are two sides to this.

If I release an image in, say, Photoshop format, I am limiting my audience.
If, however, I convert the image to a non-proprietary format, I will lose
some of the editability of the work. Which is more important, breadth of
access or depth of access? (Hmmm. This parallels some current governmental
debates on the arts here in the UK :-) ).

In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made
about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I
couldn't have done the work any other way at that time, I can't convert the
work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the
all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector
image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full
editability of the 3D version. I'm about to make some more of this work in
Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one
takes FSF-style Freedom as aguiding principle, I shouldn't even be using
Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until
Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can't even render (full-strength
masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those
features.

In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A
producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the
software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various
formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the
original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements
would become a consideration.

I'm not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are
vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some
things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.

- Rob.




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