Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Tuesday, November 30, 2004, at 10:44AM, Ricardo Gladwell 
<president AT freeroleplay.org> wrote:

>I don't really think the example negates the ability to provide a 
>transparant copy provision: there are ways around your edge example. You 
>could require "transparant" copies only where applicable (i.e. 
>explicitly exclude paintings). Conversely, you can simply require that, 
>for example, an image file in a non-proprietary format for the painting 
>is also supplied online.

Providing a high-resolution PNG of the painting is a good way of making the 
painting accessible, providing various resolutions would make it even more 
accessible (for example if I want a desktop or an illustration I'd take 
lo-rez, if I want to sample a brushstroke I'd take hi-rez). But some 
paintings are very large, and would result in multi-gigabyte files to capture 
their entire surface at a resolution useful for sampling to make equivalent 
work. The simplest way of making the painting accessible is to remove any "no 
photography" signs. People can photograph the work as well as sketch it. Are 
there any museums with "no sketching" signs?

For many artistic works there is source that can be provided: the preparatory 
work. Preparatory sketches can be provided online or in printed book format. 
Having access to the preparatory work for an artwork can be incredibly useful 
for understanding and building on the work, much like having the source code 
for a binary. 

I have two examples of this that feature work in the style of Jackson 
Pollock. 

>From the point of view of an artistic producer, at art school I was set a 
>project to make a painting that combined two existing images. I chose a 
>Pollock painting and a Futurist cyclist. The library had a book on the 
>Futurists that had the preparatory sketches for the painting of the cyclist, 
>showing how the forms of the finished painting had been abstracted from a 
>fairly literal sketch of a man on a bycicle. This allowed me to understand 
>and reproduce the compositional structure of the piece far more effectively 
>than just copying the finished result would have.

>From the point of view of an artistic consumer, Art & Language did some 
>wonderful paintings of and titled "A Portrait of Lenin In The Stryle Of 
>Jackson Pollock" around 1980. They made sketches of the images before 
>painting them, and these are very useful if you can't quite "get" the images 
>when you first see them. Those sketches are often reproduced in exhibition 
>catalogues and are available online.

Having access to the source material for even traditional media like painting 
can be very valuable for both consumers and producers. For consumers, it's 
like being able to read the source code to figure out what's going on in the 
binary. For producers, it enables remaking, reworking or build on the 
original work as surely as being able to hack and make the sources to a 
binary.

- Rob.