Development of Creative Commons licenses

["garry paxton" <garry AT paxtoncrafts.com>]

Hi,

 

I am new to this forum, and I hope I’ve chosen the correct place to pose my question.

 

I run a charity that helps people who have no natural voice of their own to communicate (perhaps following a stroke, or youngsters with cerebral palsy). We write Open Source speech software for the disabled, available under OSI GNU/GPL licenses. Everything we do is at zero cost to our clients.  

 

However, until now the charity has had to purchase clip-art and other suitable images to accompany our free communication products. To combat this we are creating an online library of photographs, symbols and clipart that the end user can download and use for free – it will also be available on CD-Rom.  

 

As well as taking our own photographs, some professional photographic libraries have been approached about our project and have kindly donated photographic images (that they typically sell elsewhere) for us to distribute freely.  We are allowed to do so providing we only supply small (800x600) images at low resolution, plus we have promised a link on our website back to the copyright owner, should an individual wish to purchase the original full size picture, or do something with the image which is outside the terms of the agreement.    

 

The following are a couple of examples describing how these images might be used, which is informing the choice of license.  

 

·         a child with visual impairment might need the image to have a different colour background (so the image will be modified locally).

·         a speech and language therapist might collate the images they find most useful into a common directory in a hospital or school, or cut their own CD-Rom that they take on their rounds, or include images in a presentation at conference.

·         An online “chat” program, written for disabled people who use images to communicate (where they have little ability to read or write) will transmit an image instead or a word across the internet.

 

So, the type of license I envisage will state that the end user:

 

·         Can make copies and distribute the images freely, as long as….

§         The license agreement, unaltered, is always copied and accompanies the images or copies of them.

§         That no commercial use may be made of these pictures without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

§         That “derivative” works are NOT distributed, eg, images are distributed only in their original form, with no modifications. Users, however, can still make local modifications (as described above, such as cropping or floodfill the background), but the user is NOT allowed to distribute those they have modified.  

·         These images can be displayed publicly.

·         These images may be moved to a different medium (e.g., from computer to printout, website to an iPAQ, etc)

·         The license applies worldwide, and applies to all copies and locally-made derivative works.     

 

From my very basic understanding, it seems that the Creative Common license by-nc-nd will do the trick.  Have I understood correctly ? My key area of concern is that we wish to allow a user to modify pictures (eg, place a cropped or colour-adjusted image) on a school website, and thus it is being published.  However, we don’t wish these modified versions to be freely distributed, only the originals. 

 

(Note, at a later date, we will allow some modified images to be distributed, but only those owned by our charity, and not those where the copyright ownership lies with a professional library – I guess we will need by-nc-sa for these).

 

Many thanks for any advice you can give.

 

Regards,

Garry