Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Peter Brink <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>]

There seems to be some serious confusion about the meaning of the 
concepts of a “work” and of a “derivative work”.

A “work” is any kind of expression of a thought, idea or concept which 
has been created by a human being; in some countries (like the U.S.) it 
needs to be fixed in a tangible medium, but in most countries it does not.

It’s in fact easier to say what a work is not, than to exactly define 
what it is:

* The work is not the physical form of the expression.
* The work is not the ideas, thoughts, facts or concepts expressed.
* The work is not the style, manner or method of expression.

A book, a pdf-file, a text-file or an openoffice-file containing the 
same expression are all _copies_ of the same work.

A “derivative work” is a transformation of a work, such as a 
translation, adaptation, arrangement of music or any other possible 
alteration of a literary or artistic work.

Daniel Carrera asks a few questions about the scope of a cc-license. 
When a licensor licenses a work under a cc-license does that mean that 
he licenses the work as cast into a particular physical form or does he 
offer a license for all the possible physical forms the work that he has 
and/or will create?

This is an interesting question. IMO the license only applies to the 
particular physical form of a work that has a cc-license attached to it. 
My reason for this line of reasoning is that the license is 
non-exclusive, meaning that the copyright holder retains the full 
copyright of the work; he can create more copies of the work and create 
derivative works based on the work. He can offer these under any terms 
he wish. If he wishes to license an MP3 version of a piece of music of 
his under a cc-license _and_ sell a WAV version, he is free to do so. 
The WAV file would then _not_ be available under the cc-license.

It would not be fair to demand that the copyright holder would _have_ to 
make all versions of a work available under the same license just 
because he has chosen to license a particular physical form of that work 
under a cc-license. In our example above the downstream user is free to 
convert (i.e. copy) the MP3 file into another format if he should wish 
to, so there is no need to treat all original versions of a work as 
licensed under the same license.


/Peter Brink