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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Clarification needed - Copyleft AND Share-Alike with Images

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: James Grimmelmann <james AT grimmelmann.net>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Clarification needed - Copyleft AND Share-Alike with Images
  • Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:23:27 -0500

Dana Powers wrote:
<snip/>
You don't ordinarily have the right to distribute my work. It's the
license which gives you the right to do so. The stipulation that the
result of combining my work with another work may only be distributed
if distributed under an equally free license no more creates a
covenant to limit the licensee's natural rights than the stipulation
that attribution must be provided, the technological measures can't be
used, that the license must be identified, etc.
Yes, CC Licenses are basically contracts used to exchange certain
copyright entitlements for various promises to attribute, notify, use
and/or re-license in particular ways.

I am very skeptical, however, that tests like "distributed with" or
"semantically related" are legally feasible. Movie soundtracks are a
bit easier because (among other things) the law already understands
what the movie industry calls "sync rights," and they are pretty easy
to define narrowly. But is there an equivalent narrow legal right for
photos used in print?

Nor is this behavior especially novel, the FSF has decades of
experience getting compliance with the same behavioral aspects of the
GPL.
Although the GPL still allows you to distribute on the same CD with
non-GPL code. How would you distinguish the two? If you say
"semantically related" I'll respectfully ask you to please define it
in a way that would be useful to a lawyer or judge.

Moreover, "semantically related" is likewise probably significantly broader than the GPL's test for "modified work." I can imagine two programs that are "semantically related" even though they are "independent and separate works." Perhaps this is not quite what fans of "semantically related" mean by the term, but that just brings us back to Dana's point: that the term is unclear.

James




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