Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> if an image or video is made copylefted by
> licensing it under the Creative Commons BY-SA
> license, then if a webpage were to embed such
> an image or video, then would it (the web page)
> become copylefted too?

As others have said: no. Because the webpage would
be a collective work, not a derived work.

> To be honest I'd prefer if both situations existed.
> I.e., if there was a Creative Commons license that
> was like the GNU GPL and if there were a Creative
> Commons license like the GNU LGPL, with respect to
> embedding.

Embedding is really aggregating. and aggregating
is nothing more than putting what could be completely
unrelated works next to each other.

The LibraryGPL is based on derivative works,
saying that basically, the work is copyleft,
but you can link to it with proprietary works.
Linking is creating a derivative work, not
an aggregate or collective work.

Using LGPL/GPL as a model, except applying it to
aggragates, Creative Commons Share Alike,
CC-SA is like a CollectiveGPL, meaning the work
is treated as copyleft, as are derivatives of the
work, but you can aggregate it with proprietary works.

If you say you can't even aggregate a copyleft work
with anything else, then very strange things happen,
not the least of which would mean that you couldn't
distribute linux on a CD with anything other than
GPL'ed code, you might need separate websites simply
to distribute GPL'ed works and non-GPLed works.

If you want to get really extreme, one could always
attempt to lobby for a copyleft license that requires
that the work can only be -distributed- with copylefted
works, meaning you'd have to do some creative routing
just to get the work from the server, through networks
using only copylefted code, to your desktop.

None of these restrictions would help the gift economy
project. And not having these restrictions do not expose
the gift economy project to unfair competition from
proprietary sources.

> For my particular usage, I could see a business model
> (a way of making a living) established on copylefting
> works under a Creative Commons license like the GNU GPL,
> ... where one would take advantage of other's reluctance
> to license their own works under the same license.

That might be an advantage for you, but such a license
would be harmful to the gift economy that created the
work in the first place.

Greg
-- 
Wikipedia and the Great Sneetches War
http://www.somerightsreserved.org