Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Tuesday 22 November 2005 03:59 pm, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-22-11 at 19:58 +0100, Peter Brink wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Thanks for the great description of a copyrightable work, but I think
> you've gone astray here. I don't think that's born out by the legal code
> of the licenses (all versions), which specifically notes:
>
>         e. "Work" means the copyrightable work of authorship offered
>         under the terms of this License.
>         [...]
>         3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this
>         License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free,
>         non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable
>         copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated
>         below:  [...]
>
> It does not specify that the licensor only grants you that license for a
> particular fixed form, but for the Work. As you noted, a printed book, a
> PDF and an OpenDocument of the same text are fixed forms of the same
> work (and, in the license sense, Work).

If this is indeed the case, and I would like to hear from someone on the CC 
legal team, I think I have released my last work under a CC license until 
this changes.

I am a BY-SA guy and this is not particularly about money, but about the 
granularity of my control on what I release under what licenses. And, on who 
I give such licenses to.
>
> > 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.
>
> I don't think this line of reasoning is sound; the last line does not
> follow from the . Yes, the copyright holder has full, non-exclusive
> rights to the work. They can do what they wish with the work, including
> licensing it under another license.
>
> But that does not make the CC license grant invalid. The license grant
> is for the work, not for the fixed form, and the WAV version is another
> form of the same work.
>
> > 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.

I can see where you would be right if your thinking above holds, but what 
about others to which you have made no such grant, whose only copy is one 
from you under different terms?
>
> I think it's an error on part of a copyright holder to think that the
> two fixed forms are different works that can be licensed differently.
> And it's also probably bad naming to call them two different "versions";
> they are two fixed forms of the same work.

If it is an error on my part, and I don't deny that such things are not 
possible, I will look for a better license for my works. I think this is 
going to be quite important to me going forward.

Also, the ability to give different licenses on the same works to different 
people and have them stick unless t hose people do subsequent transfers. 
(Which they would be free to do but may not do.)

>
> To be clear, I don't think anyone's getting their hand forced for
> anything. But if I buy a WAV of a song from Magnatune, I think it's
> entirely defensible that I use it under the terms of the license of the
> MP3 for the same recording.

Again, can someone from CC legal confirm this issue please.
>
> The only way I could see the idea that an MP3 and a WAV of the same
> recording would be different works is if one suggested that the data
> compression inherent in an MP3 is an abridgement and thus a creative
> transformation of the work into a new Derivative Work. And I think that
> a smart lawyer would show that that's not the case; if the
> transformation is automatable and done automatically without significant
> creative input from a human being, I think it's hard to defend that
> there's enough transformation to make it a Derivative Work.
>
> Here are some alternatives for those who insist on this model:
>
>       * CC-license live recordings of a song, and sell studio recordings
>       * CC-license one or two singles from an album, and sell the entire
>         album
>       * CC-license all recordings and sell media like CDs or DVDs

You could also just do a different mix.

As my aim is to release full ardour project files under a BY-SA license, this 
is of no great interest to me except as theory. I like to understand how 
these things work.
>
> In practice, the Magnatune model is probably fine for making money.
> After all, nobody wants to file-share huge fat WAV files, anyways. So if
> I pay for a WAV file, I'm either going to a) compress it to an Ogg
> Vorbis or MP3 file or b) give away CDs. Either way, no big loss for
> Magnatune.

I think they could make money without the NC option. I know they could get 
some from me that way whereas I am not too interested in sending my money for 
music with the NC option.
>
> Creative Commons has consistently bypassed any suggestions from
> copyright holders to add license elements to limit the form that
> licensees can cast the work into. I don't think that expecting this kind
> of differentiation (MP3 vs. WAV)

I don't think I would contemplate the use of license elements for these 
purposes. But I think we should have the ability to license only certain, 
let's call it "quality versions" of a work under a certain license and not 
have the license transfer to other "quality versions" which we may release 
under a different license.

Can someone comment on this with respect to image files at different 
resolutions please.

>
> ~Evan
all the best,

drew
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