Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Stephanie Rieger" <steph AT yiibu.com>]

Hi there,

 

I’ve attempted to find answers to this on the CC site as well as the list archives but have had no luck so hopefully this is not a commonly answered question. It has two parts:

 

1. Let’s say I publish an illustration/photo (in the form of a jpg) to the web using the creative commons “by attribution, non commercial” license. For arguments sake, let’s say it’s an illustration is of a taxi cab next to a phone booth. Is a licensee allowed to take a portion of the work (i.e. crop out the taxi cab and leave the rest) then re-use it in another work (post it on their web site, use it in a collage etc.) or would they require a Sampling license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/) to be allowed to do this? I other words, is sampling NOT allowed unless you have a sampling license?

 

2. How does the “by attribution, non commercial”, (or for that matter the “by attribution, sampling, non commercial”) license deal with the following scenario. Let’s say that this same photo/illustration also included a small mention at the bottom of the jpg stating “Creative Commons some rights reserved” along with the creator’s web site URL and the URI to the license in question. In cropping the taxi portion of the jpg, this copy is lost which would seem to contradict the baseline right “to keep any copyright notice intact on all copies of your work;” Is this in fact a contradiction of this baseline right? Would it be sufficient for the licensee to reproduce the “Creative Commons, some rights reserved” + the creator’s URL + URI to, in effect, match the copyright notice that was removed?

 

These questions stem from a general confusion on my part regarding attribution. We are starting a new company that will be creating (and hopefully selling) Creative Commons licensed, shareable content. I have noticed that, although there is lots of content out there that uses links to the various licenses, no one seems to have taken the time to deal with the specific questions that licensees may have about attribution. In fact, I’ve yet to find anyone (i.e. an author or licensor) that actually specifies a manner of attribution even though the Creative Commons Deeds all state “You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.” This seems to leave it wide open for licensees to interpret the attribution clause in any way they see fit which, in the long run will likely result in many of them providing incorrect attribution or using incorrect verbiage when referring to the license. (That said, the more complicated the attribution process, the less likely people may take the time to follow it but the very lack of information about attribution has already created complication in my mind.) Is anyone at Creative Commons working on attribution related FAQs – even just general guidelines for licensees such as “if no specific method of attribution is specified, here is a list of commonly acceptable methods for print, web etc..….”, maybe accompanied with a simple checklist i.e. “did you remember to link to the license?”

 

Any input is appreciated!

Thanks,

 

Stephanie Rieger