Development of Creative Commons licenses

[wolfgang wander <wwc AT lns.mit.edu>]

Hi Teun,

  I guess the surprise is not so much the commercial use.  If you
didn't want commercial usage you could use an NC license and expect
(or better: hope) that this prohibits commercial use of your
photographs.  It's also not about the attribution alone, since CC-BY
(without the SA) requires everyone who uses your image to acknowledge
the author.

  The surprise factor comes from the apparent lack of bite for the SA
part of the license.  Most people I know expect SA to mean Share Alike
even or especially when your photographs are used in an editorial
context, which means that the resulting work, in which a publisher has
built upon your photographs and enhanced the value of his article,
should be licensed under an Open (or Alike) license.  This is not the
case.  Since SA is sold to you as a copyleft license, it is surprising
to see that it apparently allows for economic free rides.

  Hope this clarifies my surprise ;-)

             Wolfgang

PS:   If you only want attribution, CC-BY is for you. And since CC-BY-SA
acts for photographs like CC-BY you can chose either one without much
of an effect. (SA only refers to images generated from your original
photograph, so yes - there is some difference but not any with regards
to editorial use, the primary use for photographs).


teun spaans wrote:
> I'm not an expert in licenses by far, but I gather from this thread that
> people are surprised that their contributions licensed under CC-BY-SA
> can be
> used in commercial works. I have often distributed my photos on
> http://commons.wikimedia.org under this license, because I want to offer
> them for free, as long as I am ackowledged as the photographer. I am
> fine if
> they are used as part of commercial copyrighted books or dvds - as long as
> they acknowledge my name.
> 
> Is there another license I should have used instead of CC-BY-SA?
> 
> 
> 
> On 2/19/07, Fred Benenson <fcb AT fredbenenson.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > cc-licenses mailing list
>> > cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
>> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> The content of this email message is licensed under a Creative Commons
>> Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License, Some Rights Reserved.
>> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> cc-licenses mailing list
>> cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
>>
>>
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> cc-licenses mailing list
> cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses