Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

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