Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Tue, 2007-20-02 at 18:24 -0500, wolfgang wander wrote:

>   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.

That's not entirely true. My limited understanding is that it is still
undecided whether an illustration combined with text is a derivative
work of that image,  when you're talking about an image embedded in a
Web page. Media are miscible; whether an illustrated article is a single
mixed-media work or two separate and merely juxtaposed works is probably
pretty context sensitive.

I think it's probably a bad idea to look to Wikipedia and Wikimedia
Commons as an example here. Wikimedia users _want_ images and text to be
distinct and thus not subject to copyleft rules, but this is largely
because Wikipedia folks have been _extremely_ sloppy about images and
copyright in the past.

Wikimedia Commons is more interesting in the context of license
compatibility and authors' comfort level. Most photographers who've made
their works available under a license technically incompatible with the
GFDL (Wikipedia's and most Wikimedia projects' default license) don't
seem to care one bit that their work is distributed on Wikimedia
Commons. Why? Because the spirit of the licenses are roughly the same,
and because the details that us license junkies think are
galaxy-shattering really don't matter to most creators.

In any event, the most important thing to take away from this is that
text and images combined in an article is a grey area.

~Evan


________________________________________________________________________
Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>
http://evan.prodromou.name/

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