Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Dana Powers" <dana.powers AT gmail.com>]

Agreed, but this is a stipulation in the contract - that time
synchronization will be treated as an Adaptation for purposes of the
license - so what is creative and what isn't shouldn't really impact
the result.

Industry lawyers, to my understanding, treat synch licensing as a
special case of the reproduction right, although not always
explicitly.  The reason time synchronization became important was not
because it was particularly creative, but because there was a need to
differentiate between reproductions of music onto vinyl/tape/cd
(usually called mechanical licenses) and the more specialized
reproductions onto the audio track of a movie.  People saw them as
different and were willing to negotiate different terms for each.

As for the media translation, I think the only thing you could do is
encode the audio with literally no video.  I think AVI supports this,
but I'm not sure about the others.  I can imagine a few scenarios
where this might be useful (portable media devices whose "free" codec
support is limited to video), but generally it seems more applicable
to encodings in new audio formats.

dp

On 4/11/07, Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> Dana Powers wrote:
> > I honestly can't think of how you could digitally combine a musical
> > work with a video without synching.  Even the most basic arrangement,
> > having both start simultaneously, seems to fit the definition.
>
> You cannot combine an image into a text article in PDF format without
> making a precise specification of its location on the page. However, the
> PDF document, like the HTML page it could've been based on, has been
> described as "a collection".
>
> The point is that the location of the image on the page is not itself a
> creative part of the work. The fact that an automatic typesetter
> actually had to place it *somewhere* doesn't constitute synching.
>
> (IMHO, anyway, and based on previous posts by people who evidently
> understand the law better than I do :-) ).
>
> I would imagine that the same situation applies to video. Yes, there is
> *some* synch position of the sound with the video as a technical result
> of changing the format of the data. However this is not a creative
> decision, because there is no *meaningful* synchronization of sound
> events to video events.
>
> Another thought experiment: I'm sure you've at least once in your life
> set up your sound and television to show completely unrelated sources
> (play a music album over the speakers, and have silent video on the
> screen). What if you just recorded the result? Would that be
> "synchronization", even though there was absolutely no creative effort
> involved in choosing the timing relationship between the two? IMHO, it
> would not be -- the mere mechanical synchronization that results from
> recording a random, non-significant relation in time should not be
> considered "synchronization".
>
> Of course, it would be difficult to prove this if there is any
> meaningful video signal at all -- I would think that a blank screen, or
> possibly a static image with a title card would be about the only thing
> you could defend.
>
> Of course, IANAL, etc.
>
> But that's what it seems like would be necessary to be consistent.
>
> Cheers,
> Terry
>
>
> --
> Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
> Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
>
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