Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Sun, 2005-23-10 at 04:33 +0200, Hannes wrote:
> How come the comics suggests that they are, or 
> is not the "collage" in their example clearly a collective work?
The collage is very clearly a derivative work.

A collective work is a mere juxtaposition of independent works. Examples would be a poetry anthology, a magazine (with photos and stories), an album with songs by different artists, an Internet radio stream, a talent show.

A derivative work takes parts or the whole of one or more other works and combines them with possibly new material to make a single, cohesive whole. Examples of derivative works: a sequel (takes characters and story line), a collage, an annotated novel, a mash-up, a re-mix, fan fiction, a movie based on a novel.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think one key difference between a Collective Work and a Derivative Work relationship is that you could re-shuffle or remove the parts of a Collective Work without affecting any of the other contained works. For example, if you moved one article of a magazine from page 138 to page 203, it wouldn't make a whit of difference. If your Internet radio show left out one Tori Amos track, it wouldn't affect the other tracks that were played in the slightest.

But for a Work that has a Derivative Work relationship with some Original Work, you can't just rearrange or interchange the Original Work. It plays an important part in the whole. If you use a cow's head instead of an egret's head over George Bush's body in your political collage, there's a significant difference in the work. (As well as if you put the head down on his shoes rather than on his shoulders.) If you re-mix Sgt. Pepper's instead of the White Album, that's gonna be a really different resulting piece.

So I think the idea of the score of a film having a Collective Work relationship to the rest of the movie is wrong. If you play the goofy circus music during the comedy scene, and the schmaltzy violin music during the love scene, that's going to set a significantly different emotional tone than if you play them vice versa. I think it's pretty fair to say that the music forms an integral part of the impact of the film.

~Evan