Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

Now now Terry,

> Also, I expect to create By-SA content commercially as much as I can get
> away with, and I have serious doubts about someone with the sorts of
> motivations you envision being happy with that. The fact that I'm making
> money, partly enabled by their content is going to piss them off, if
> they really have this "I'm giving to charity" and "I don't want to
> undercut commercial competition" idea in their heads. If that's what
> they are thinking, then they are really thinking in terms of NC, not SA
> licensing.

I suppose this is meant to hit close to home. And I'm sorry if that sets
the tone of my reply...

Let me just state this:

People chose SA over NC and this should be the only measure you
should apply as to what they have in their heads.

While Creative Commons avoids explaining the issues concerning mixing
images and text, they are very clear about the fact that CC-by-SA
allows commercial re-use.  So People choosing SA know full well that
their content can be used commercially.  Commercial use is fine - as long
as Share-Alike and BY rules are followed.

Interesting to see however how you 'know' in your head what they or we
are thinking...

It's easy to insinuate sinister motives to discredit other arguments, easy
but maybe not effective...

Its as easy to point out the hypocrisy for melodramatically
threatening to abandon CC if they ever consider to publish any license
other than 'CC-BY':

> A creator is always, in a game theoretic sense going to
> be motivated to seek more and more control. But that's not what we're
> supposed to be about here (or if it is, then I have to abandon CC entirely).

and moments later that same person explains to us that he needs non-Free
all-about-control 'Verbatim-Only' licenses:

> The articles are usually By-SA, but I occasionally use a
> "Verbatim Only" license. The latter is useful if the article is very
> precisely stating an opinion which may be controversial and which I
> don't want misrepresented.

Yet again a few sentences later he claims that not being able to
combine any given text with any given image is 'muzzling free
speech!'.

Wait!?! A 'Verbatim Only' license does NOT do this?  What if my free
speech evolves about making my points using your words out of context?

> But uh-oh, according to your plan, I'm in a deadlock. I have By-SA and
> ARR photos in one article. Can't publish. You've muzzled my free speech
> rights!  And remember, my article text is normally under By-SA anyway.

Sorry - couldn't resist...

But lets not go there any further,  instead lets try to clarify some of your 
other
arguments:

> If we were to apply the suggested rule, then we would have the shocking
> case where I can use copylefted material under "fair use" in an ARR
> work, but I *can't* use ARR work under fair use in a copylefted work!

Sorry - I'm not following you here.  Can't you already now use
copy-lefted material in an ARR work?  Wasn't the whole discussion about
an ARR text using copy-lefted images and declaring the whole product to
be ARR?

... or for that matter taking any by-SA text (your blog for example) and
combining it with an ARR image to make the complete aggregation ARR?

> Remember when the CSS folks were suing people for merely *linking* to
> pages describing or providing DeCSS? That's almost certainly a "semantic
> link" (and from a software perspective, it is nearly identical to the
> way an image is identified from HTML code -- the text and picture do not
> actually come together except within the user's browser. No "copy" of
> the combined work is ever actually made!

A little far fetched - to stay with your evil-doer analogy, one
would have to inline (maybe per HTML-frame or such) the DeCSS code
into the text describing it, pretty much like adding an image via <img
src> to existing text.

Or to transform the analogy to the other side, nobody I know has any
problems linking (<a href>here</a>, rather than <img src>) cc-by-sa
images from ARR text.

> Then there's the question of transformative use. If you take a really
> nice picture of a fork, it may be a wonderful work in its own right, but
>  if I make a clever pun in my article about "forking" a project, and use
> the fork picture as the punchline, do you really feel that my work is
> sufficiently dependent on your authorship that you should have the right
> to tell me how to license my work?

Absolutely!  By using it *you* make it dependent.  You, not the
photographer creates the dependence.  It should be easy enough for you
to find another fork picture to make the same clever pun.

Likewise, when I want to use your by-SA article and have my own ARR
picture of an even nicer fork, should I or shouldn't I be able to take
your article, semantically link it with my fork image to create ARR
content?

> You all are right of course, that there is a negative consequence to be
> found here in that people may suddenly decide to retract commercial
> quality By-SA work. But you know what? In my experiences on Flickr, I
> find that much of the *best* photography is actually under the "By"
> license. So I don't think it's as big of a threat as you make it out to be.

As I've said before: Many Flickr users and most photographers I've
talked to who published under CC-by-SA have been 'tricked' (to use
your words) by the Share Alike term in the license.  Just search
Flickr's forums for people's interpretation of this license.  Of all
the feedback I had regarding this issue - once people understand the
limited Share-Alike-ness - very few seem willing to license further
content under this CC-by-Like license.

> And as for your wanting to trick or pressure people into making their
> content free-licensed, I think that is seriously wrong-headed. There are
> enough good reasons to create free-licensed content, and enough of us
> doing it everyday anyway, that it's not going to go away. Free licensed
> images help to enable that content by providing freely distributable
> images to go along with freely distributable articles.

And this is exactly what cc-by-sa publishing photographers intended, It's
the non-free ARR articles and by no means your CC-by-SA blog we are
worried about.

> The fact that
> there are also some edge case free-rider situations is really a pretty
> minor problem, in my opinion, and it simply isn't worth all of the
> problems it would create.

It is a growing problem though.  So far Share Alike was interpreted by
most as referring to the editorial content that goes with the images
as well. And so far - when I gave ARR content providers *my*
interpretation of the Share Alike clause they removed these images or
negotiated other license terms.  But after getting to know Creative
Commons interpretation of Share Alike this will no longer be possible.

Coming back to the original question:

Some photographers want a means to contribute to Free projects like
Wikipedia without ARR projects taking their content and using it in a
very Share-Un-Alike manner.

Given the current state of the license this is not possible.

The question really boils down to:

 a) do you want to alienate these photographers who want to contribute
    to Free projects while keeping the ARR content providers happy,
    i.e. leave everything it is now.

 b) or do you want to level the playing field, invite more Free
    thinking people to the table and ask ARR providers to either
    join the game or find other sources of content?

I'm very well aware of the fact that going from a) to b) will take
some effort and there are many hurdles to overcome which you list
carefully (and I even more carefully tend to ignore ;-) but unless the
consensus is here that a) is the better solution Creative Commons
should IMHO try see if there is such a path...

        Wolfgang