Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> I'm looking for a little clarification: Is share-alike actually the
> same as copyleft?
> 
> In the recent thread on "Share-Alike with images"
> (https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2007-February/004960.html)
> it was made clear that the Creative Commons is directing people that
> the result of using a Share-alike licensed image in a mixed-media
> whole (such as writing an article describing the image) is not
> considered a derivative work, except for setting sound to video.
> 
> The historic use, and the use most people are familiar with, is the
> use of copyleft in the Free Software movement, exemplified by licenses
> such as the GPL. In this realm copyleft is used as a means to achieve
> the goal of expanding the base of freely licensed software.

However, practical experience with creative works (e.g. creating
websites), shows what a mess it would be if CC-By-SA were binding on
associated works in other media.

It's quite possible that it is legally impossible for By-SA copyleft on
images to bind web pages that include them, for example. It is routine
in publishing for "text" and "illustrations" to have separate
attribution and licensing.

It would be ruinous to the movement if, for example, it became
impossible to use (i.e. reference) GFDL, By-SA, FAL, By, Expat, and/or
GPL images in a single HTML document.  In fact, in my own experience, it
has been generally bad enough even that I can't combine GFDL images with
 CC-By-SA images within Gimp for use with an article.  We don't need a
stronger copyleft than that.

Remember that GPL has never attempted to bind programs that are merely
distributed on the same disk, and the giant GNU/Linux distributions like
Debian would be impossible (or at least a whole lot more difficult) if
these kinds of rules were imposed.

The truth is that there is a balance to be struck:

Too little copyleft results in bleed-out of content from the free
commons into proprietary hands.

Too much copyleft results in incompatibility between free license and a
commons broken up into lots of tiny private commonses which are too
small to be useful.

Either would be bad. In fact, of course, this is not mono-dimensional --
there are many ways in which a copyleft can be 'strong' or 'weak', and
the effect tends to be different for different types of work, which is
the principle motivator for having multiple licenses in the first place.

Trying to find ways in which licenses can

1) remain strongly copyleft to prevent hijacking of free content for
proprietary use

2) retain their particular specific character for particular media

and

3) allow sufficient interconversion to prevent division of the free commons

is a major concern of present-day license stewards such as the FSF and CC.

Usually it's described as fighting "license proliferation", though in
fact, it's only *incompatible* "license proliferation" that matters.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com