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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Case study: Magnatune

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Case study: Magnatune
  • Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 17:30:52 -0500

On Tue, 2005-22-11 at 21:18 +0000, Daniel Carrera wrote:
Evan suggested that the criteria might be "creative altering". That is, 
not just altering in a way that can be automated, but one that actually 
requires a human (okay, this is a very short summary of a long and 
detailed line of reasoning).

That is my understanding of what makes a derivative work versus an identical work.

For programmers, a good comparison would be source code and object code. If you compile Pascal source code for a program into an executable binary, that binary is not a derivative work of the source; it is another form of the same work. However, if you port the code from Pascal to C, the new source code _is_ a derivative work.

The difference is the amount of creativity and thought that goes into the transformation. Copying a file from one computer to another is not creatively transformative; encoding a program as a long poem (like the DeCSS haiku ) most definitely is.

I'm sorry if this is unclear or not sufficiently algorithmic for some people, but the law isn't like that.

~Evan




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