Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Tuesday 06 June 2006 04:20 pm, Terry Hancock wrote:
> Nancy Ide wrote:
> >  We have two licenses, an "open" license that applies to appropriately
> >  freely redistributable, which you can see at http://
> >  projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ANC/ANC_SecondRelease_EndUserLicense_Open.htm
> >
> >  This strikes me as certainly within the spirit of BY-SA. Any text we
> >  took from the web would be under the open license. Does anyone have
> >  an opinion as to whether this license would be consistent with
> >  BY-SA?
>
> Even without reading I can say "no".
>
> The By-SA requires that the material remain under the By-SA. It
> supercedes anything you might want to write about it.
>
> You can't even convert By-SA to GPL or vice-versa. This is one of
> the legal foibles of the copyleft concept -- even if the two licenses
> are *conceptually* similar, they are *legally* distinct.
>
> You need to redraft the license to *exempt* the By-SA material,
> so that its license is not affected. I see you already have the
> "mere aggregation" terms in your license, so your terms are
> consistent with having differently-licensed material in the same
> distribution -- which is what you need to do.
>
> >  We also have a "restricted license" that covers materials in the
> >  corpus contributed by publishers. This license is at http://
> >  projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ANC/
> >  ANC_SecondRelease_EndUserLicense_Restricted.html
> >
> >  However, commercial users have to use a third license listed at
> >  http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ANC/ (the ANCC Commercial License
> >  Agreement--it's a doc download), even for open texts, for some
> >  reason. IANAL either, so I have to rely on the UPenn team.
>
> Same note applies to these. It really doesn't make any difference
> either way -- you can have restricted and unrestricted material
> on the same medium without causing problems.
>
> >  My
> >  only problem with it is that the UPenn lawyers say that we cannot use
> >  share-alike texts because of that third license. If it were up to
> >  us, we'd distribute the whole thing under a CC-like BY-SA license.
>
> Well, basically, you have a sales problem then. You need to convince
> those lawyers that they work for you, and not the other way around.
>
> Odds are, they are suffering from some of the same misconceptions
> that we've been trying to address with you.  If you like, we'll talk to
> them. ;-)
>
> All they have to do is exempt the By-SA material (which they actually
> have to do for any of the EULAs you describe).
>
> >  Also to Terry's statement that Google and others mine the web (BTW
> >  data mining is really something different, technically--it means
> >  getting new, non-explicit knowledge from existing data, not just
> >  gathering statistics, but this is a minor point)
>
> It's still "data" and hence non-infringing, for our purposes.

Well, see, that depends. The stats I think I fully agree with. It is the 
annotation I am unclear about. What does one of their annotated texts look 
like? Would the annotations count as a derivative? (As opposed to the stats 
which we two at least don't see as being an issue.) I think this question 
needs to be answered before we can know more on this particular point.
>
> Consider this: suppose I freeze frame a TV image of Star Trek.  Then I
> collect all of the pixels.  Now I rearrange them into a picture of the
> Taj Mahal.  Have I infringed Paramount's copyright?  NO. Because the
> work was sufficiently "transformative" -- the result really has little to
> do with the original. You can't copyright colored pixels (too simple --
> even a structure as complex as a glyph in a printing font is too simple
> according to standards set by the US Copyright office -- that's why you
> can't copyright fonts in the US).
>
> Likewise, you can't copyright words.  If you scramble a work into a
> histogram of the occurances of certain phrases or words (for example),
> then the resulting product, though it may contain every single word
> in the original, is not a "derivative work".  It's too "transformative",
> and each individual "copy" is of a tiny piece of the original, well within
> the bounds of the fair use concept of "academic quoting".   Now, of course,
> IANAL, and I suppose a lawyer might disagree with me, but I'd love to see
> their argument if they do, because that just wouldn't make
> any sense to me.
>
> Certainly if you blend a work in with many other works, and similarly
> scramble the content, you will be in the fair use category, because even
> a complex word count couldn't figure out that the words are from
> particular works (well, it might be able to guess if it's a really smart
> algorithm based on rare words, but that's not relevant).
>
> The point is, it is not a derivative work just because it has the same
> words in it. The words have to retain their original structure and meaning.
>
> If it's a story, then the story still has to be there, for example.
>
>  > --see my earlier
> >
> >  note. They--and anyone else--can do it with no problem because they
> >  do not redistribute the data.
>
> If you mean they do not redistribute the original data set, I agree.
>
> I doubt whether this would actually be a problem for their data product,
> for the reasons I outlined above.
>
> If it is, then "fair use" is badly broken, which is entirely possible.
> However,
> AFAIK, "fair use" hasn't really got a solid definition, but is, rather,
> defined
> by precedents.  It seems much more likely that this is a case of
> conservative
> fear of going to court over the issue, because you have some perception
> that it *might* be infringing. But I don't think it is.
>
> >  The non-commercial part is still a mystery to me.
>
> As to us all, even those who use it, AFAICT. ;-)

Aint that the truth!
>
>  > The goal of our
> >
> >  license is to restrict our commercial users (many of whom are
> >  publishers) from "re-publishing" any of the ANC materials and making
> >  a profit. That would certainly be ok with most authors, I think, so
> >  why could we not use NC texts? Publishers can, however, use the
> >  materials as a resource to develop dictionaries, reference books, and
> >  ESL texts. Under fair use, they can directly quote no more than
> >  about 250 contiguous words, but that is all--and they rarely if ever
> >  do in any event.
>
> Note that CC-By-SA is incompatible with CC-By-NC-SA for this same
> reason: CC-By-SA prevents additional restrictions from being placed
> on the work, and NC is an additional restriction.
>
> In fact, this has been a pretty hot issue for some time now ("hot"
> as in people get pretty hot under the collar over it).
>
> >  I imagine we would have to work out the degree to which our
> >  licenses are consistent with CC's, especially the Commercial License
> >  Agreement, so I'd like to get a grip on that issue first.
>
> Again, you're just going to have to talk to those lawyers.  The EULA
> must not be construed to affect the CC-licensed material.
>
> This is really dead simple, and they really need to get their heads
> around it, it's not like lawyers haven't figured this stuff out before.
>
> In fact, if the problem is that they won't listen to a non-lawyer, you
> should consider talking to Eben Moglen' Software Freedom Law Center.
> It's even possible that they would do it pro-bono, if it's just to promote
> free-licensing and it's not complicated (which it shouldn't be):
>
> http://www.softwarefreedom.org
>
> "If you would like to learn more about having the SFLC present
> to your group, please contact us
> <http://www.softwarefreedom.org/contact.html>." might be a good thing to
> follow
> up on.
>
> >  We even give our authors a cute little "ANC Author" logo to put on
> >  their web sites if they contribute ;)
>
> The motivational power of little certification images never ceases
> to amaze me.
>
> >  Thanks again for your comments and insights, and apologies for my
> >  prior frontal attack...
>
> No sweat. Everybody does it at least once. ;-)

Have I used up my freebies yet?
>
> Cheers,
> Terry

all the best,

drew
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