Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Fred Benenson" <fcb AT fredbenenson.com>]

Let me chime in as another BY-SA photographer who was once unclear about what SA meant for photos in text. I shoot a lot of concert photography (see 
http://flickr.com/photos/fcb/sets/72157594528416158/
 and http://flickr.com/photos/fcb/sets/72157594517541236/ for recent sets) and have recent signed contracts for the commercial rights of some shots for worldwide distribution in music magazines through an international agency. My assumption was that the agency a) didn't notice or bother to understand the terms of BY-SA licenses on my photos and b) wanted a higher resolution version of the photos for print, so they went ahead and "asked" for my permission. Which is fine. They tell me I should be getting a royalty check on the 15th of every month. 

Anyway, I've been specifically avoiding the NC licenses for the various complications which I'm sure you're all aware of, but at the end of the day, I've still got a sliver of worry about blatant commercial redistribution of work based on my photos with only an attribution given in return, so maybe I'm with Wolfgang on this. Perhaps, you might say, Fred's just not totally comfortable with the terms of BY-SA and should use NC instead, but my justification for my worry here is because I do feel as if there's a bit of a disconnect in possible reward of authoring a copy left photo vs. authoring copy left software.

This is a worry that has been brought to my attention often by many people who understand both the values of the free software world AND the realities of the cultural world: the GPL represents terms that are now unquestionably attractive to coders, whereas the the attractiveness of licensing BY-SA is still unclear to photographers and artists, to say the least.  So how do we get the photography, art, music, whatever, community to have the conversations so that they are comfortable with the BY-SA terms? Are there better terms that they might be happier with?  Unfortunately, and I think this is Mike's point, even assuming we can
have those conversations, it is not clear that we'll be able to come to
any better terms than those that are already in BY-SA simply because
the notion of "derivative" is interpreted differently in different
kinds of works.  

So is our goal going to be to re-align the values of the photography community by telling them that attribution is simply *enough* of a reward if TIME Magazine starts reusing their work? It doesn't seem like we have any other options given the realities of what BY-SA protects. 

While I'm pretty sure I (as well as other free culture supporters) can and have certainly convinced ourselves that attribution from TIME is enough of a reward; it seems as if it might be an uphill battle within the royalties-based photography community.  That's a reality we, as people who care about preserving free culture, need to realize. 

And what if photographers never bite? 25 Million photos on Flickr is a wonderfully successful metric, but I'm worried BY-SA isn't enough of an incentive to initiate the kind of movement (some would call it a revolution) inside the photography community that the GPL initiated inside the software community.  The GPL spoke to freedoms that software programmers felt from the day they started writing their own software, but does BY-SA do the same for photographers? What happens if we find that the freedoms elucidated by "copy left" are inherently not as meaningful or rewarding in
cultural works as they are in software source: what do we do then? This question keeps me up at night. 


Anyway, for now I'm sticking with the kludge of uploading only low-resolution web versions of my photos....




Fred Benenson
http://www.fredbenenson.com

On 2/16/07, wolfgang wander < wwc AT lns.mit.edu> wrote:

Peter Brink wrote:
> wolfgang wander skrev:
>> Now looking at this FAQ - it requires 'a collection of works in their
>> exact original format, not adaptations'.  In my view:
>>
>>    * any print of a digital image is an adaptation and
>>      certainly not the original format.
>>    * any editorial use of my full size image (it has
>>      to be scaled, maybe cropped) is an adaptation
>>      and certainly neither one is the original format.
>>
>> Even this very much hidden-from-view FAQ would very clearly exclude
>> editorial use of my images.
>
> No. It very clearly does not. An adaptation is a transformation of a
> work, a translation being the classic example. Copies are not
> adaptations. If you scan an picture and create a digital image of that
> picture you create a copy. This follows from how that concept (copying)
> is defined in copyright law. cropping and scaling are not transformative
> enough for the end result to become an adaptation.

Now Peter - this may be very clear to you as you are used the the
language of copyright licenses.  For me as a lay person a resized
or printed version of my original jpg file is everything but original
format.

If the above FAQ is the only clarification that Creative Commons
provides so that I as a licensor can make an informed decision
about cc-by-sa it is not sufficient by any means.

For a lay person's reading of this paragraph I would consider the FAQ
entry misleading at best.

> CC's licenses (as does all open source/open content licenses) build upon
> copyright law. They do not extend nor do they expand the scope of
> protection allowed under copyright law (which would be the case if your
> interpretation was correct). The distinction btw adaptation and copying
> is not one created by this community it follows from the common usage of
> those concepts in copyright law.

I begin to understand that now.  CC is however not doing a good job when
it talks about the concepts of Share-Alike.  My intention as a content
creator was to license my work so that sites that publish their content
under a similar license (most notably the wiki family) could use my work
but that my work cannot be used for a free ride to increase the value of
non-free editorial content.  The side effect is that you seem to make
wikimedia the worlds largest gratis stock photography agency.

Conceptually:
Without licensing my work under a CC or alike license I hold the
exclusive rights to my work.  Now I can certainly grant another person
the rights to copy my work, either for free or for money.  And I can
certainly do this for any number of people.  Now why isn't it possible
to come up with a license that defines this group of people as those
who are willing to combine my work with Free content only?

    Wolfgang
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