Development of Creative Commons licenses

[rob AT robmyers.org]

Quoting Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>:

> On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 20:17 -0500, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > Even still, I don't feel very able to choose when I find
> > out that SA isn't a proper copyleft
>
> IANAL but will be incredibly surprised to find that the FDL or GPL work
> any differently.

Legally I think you are right (IANAL either). But in practice it is probably
better to think of BY-SA as being an LGPL-like license for images 
rather than a
GPL-like license.

I have never spoken to a legal layperson who *wasn't* surprised by how BY-SA
works for images. It might be worth CC's time to explain in the FAQ or
somewhere that this is a result of copyright law rather than any unusual
decisions on CC's part.

> CC BY-SA is copyleft -- copyleft just doesn't work the
> way you hoped, because your understanding that placing an unaltered
> photo alongside text creates a derivative of the photo was incorrect.

To answer both this and James's earlier point regarding derivation, the 
problem
isn't that people want derivation to be something that it is not. The problem
is that people are not always satisfied with derivation as the choke-point of
copyleft for artistic works.

Forget copyright law for a moment. In the editorial example the images 
are being
*used* to add value to another work which is then being *distributed* 
and people
are experiencing the results as some kind of synergy. This is not derivation
under copyright law, but it is more than just copying the photo. And the
results are not Free. In gift economy terms this is free riding. In rights
terms, you do not have the same rights over the results that you would 
over the
source.

Derivation is not always a satisfactory legal hook for describing the idea of
copyleft in law. This is a limit of derivation-based descriptions of copyleft,
not of copyleft itself. NC is not limited to derivation for example.

- Rob.