Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 13:38 -0500, Greg London wrote:
> For something like Creative Commons, where teh licenses can cover pretty
> much ANYTHING taht can be copyrighted, it doesn't make sense to me to
> require user-editable source in an "acceptable" format, because "editable"
> and "acceptable" would be a lot of headaches from a legal standpoint,
> and it could easily prohibit legitimate uses simply because someone
> doesn't think the format is easy enough to edit or an "accepted" format.
I think the GPL has a good definition for source -- the "preferred format for editing", or something like that. Which means: if you make a drawing with Adobe Illustrator (say), distribute the .ai file as well as the resulting .png or .tiff or whatever.

The big advantage of requiring source is that downstream users can more easily exercise their rights to make derivative works. It's harder to work with bitmap images like JPEG or PNG than with vector graphics formats like SVG. It's more difficult to work with compressed in Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format than with lossless formats like WAV or FLAC. It's easier still to remix music when you have access to the original tracks before they were mixed down.

The big downside is that editable formats are usually an order of magnitude or more greater in size than the playable/visible/readable version. So by requiring that an editable version be present, you make a 3Mib MP3 download into a 45Mib WAV + MP3 download. It's more convenient for the (minority) of users who'll actually make remixes, but much less convenient for most listeners. The typical way to get around this problem, in the software world, is to allow the person making derivative works to distribute source and "binary" separately.

I think an additional license element to require source availability would be really useful.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan AT bad.dynu.ca                OOO