Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Baryonic Being <feedback AT corfizz.com>]

Hello,

I'm not Creative Commons, nor affiliated with them; I'm also not a lawyer, but I do have my own understanding of these licenses. I also know Creative Commons said they would be revamping their FAQ, so hopefully they'll pick up on your confusion.

As far as I understand it, the non-sampling licenses *do* allow sampling - i.e. you can take just a piece of the work and, so long as you continue to abide by the license terms, you can use it. This is for all non-sampling licenses *except* those with the no-derivatives clause. I believe cropping an image, for example, counts as a transformation, and would probably therefore constitute a derivative. And obviously, sampling an image with the noncommercial license is only allowed for noncommercial purposes.

As for your second point, I would assume that you can reconstitute the attribution notice in that hypothetical example.

I think you'd only have difficulty with the no-derivatives licenses, which are a bit awkward. If an attribution-no-derivatives image had an attribution notice on the actual image, then, strictly speaking, you would not be allowed to transpose that same notice on top of a cropped portion of the image, because that would constitute a derivative. In practice, nobody could really care, but you wouldn't want to risk it. I would just provide an attribution notice in the same place that I would put any other similar copyright notice. For example, if it's in a magazine, it usually goes in a small-print caption up one side of the image, or in a long acknowledgments list at the front.

I hope that helps, but as I say, I can't speak for CC, or for the Law.

On 17 Aug 2005, at 08:04, Stephanie Rieger wrote:

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

--
This email has been verified as Virus free
Virus Protection and more available at http://www.plus.net

_______________________________________________

cc-licenses mailing list

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses