Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Peter Brink wrote:
> Also there is, in my mind, no "semantic syncing" between text and 
> pictures. In general one can remove either and the remaining part is 
> unchanged, i.e. the two are really independent of each other.

In the case of pictures chosen to "illustrate" a text, I agree. The text
usually will stand by itself, and of course, the pictures will.

However, I did mention that there are examples such as "photo comics"
where this is clearly no longer true. I don't know of anyone actually
doing it this way, but it *is* possible to do this with HTML, CSS, and
separate image and text files. Nevertheless, *I* would regard such a
combination as sufficiently "derivative" to impose the copyleft.

Which breaks the theory that you can define the boundary as being
whether the image data is included in a single image file. In the past,
I have avoiding combining works into a single image file, however, if
they appear to have incompatible licensing. But it does seem like the
resulting composition is a more likely measure of whether a "derivation"
or "collection" is the result.

Is it safe to assume that an array of images such as:

image 1  |  image 2
---------+-----------
image 3  |  image 4

is safely a "collection" (even if each image is cropped?). Even if the
images are actually delivered as one large image?

What about an inset:

image 1  |  image 2
---------+
image 2     image 2

?

In this case, image 1, is "overlapping" image 2 (or image 2 is cropped
into an L shape, take your pick). Is this a derivative or a collection?

This becomes a practical issue if Image 2 is a GFDL (only) image from
Wikipedia, while Image 1 is a By-SA image from Flickr. (This is not
hypothetical -- I actually have an image like this on my hard drive,
which I had hoped to use, but then realized there might be a legal
problem with it).

What happens in practice is that I will sometimes use a "thematic" image
as a "background" and set specific "inset" images on top of it. After
thinking about this, though, I started trying to stick to "By" images
for backgrounds.

Which raises another point, actually. Is it possible that my inset
example is a "derivation" as far as the license of Image 2 is concerned,
but only a "collection" from the point of view of Image 1? (Because it
is used in an entire or simple-cropped form). That would be kind of whacky.

Cheers,
Terry



-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com