Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Jonathon Blake" <jonathon.blake AT gmail.com>]

Terry wrote:

> Likewise, you can't copyright words.

One of the issues is how much text can be different, for the text to
have a different copyright owner .  [Or, as frustrated Bible students
put it:  "Why does USB-4 and NA-27 require copyright permission from
two different places, when the texts are identical, except for
punctuation.? To be followed by "Then why don't I need permission to
quote Stephanus TR, when his text is virtually the same as NA-26?"]

> 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".

And at the other end of the spectrum, individual character pairs and
triplets can be used to identify the author (amongst other things) of
a text.   So even though you have randomly assembled character pairs
and triplets, derived from the authors writing, it is still
identifiable as being from that specific author, and not another,
different author.

> 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,

It doesn't have to be rare words.  Common words will suffice.  I first
saw the algorithm (in Pascal) 20 odd years ago. [ IIRC, common words
were better indicators than rare words were, and not only because of
their frequency.]

> 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 this was a musical composition, I'd disagree with you, citing case
law.   And because of that stupid case law, a case can built on the
project being a derivative work, and thus an infringing work,  if the
copyright owner has not given permission for the project to use their
material.  (Note: "a case" does not mean "a good case". )

> If it is, then "fair use" is badly broken, which is entirely possible.

"Fair Use" has some pretty interesting limits.   This might be one of them.

> 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.

They have.  Their perception is that a 10 minute explanation won't
satisfy the client as much as ten hours of research (even if unneeded)
and an hour to explain it in legalese, then plain English will.

xan

jonathon
--
Ethical conduct is a vice.
Corrupt conduct is a virtue.

Motto of Nacarima.