Development of Creative Commons licenses

[jonathon <jonathon.blake AT gmail.com>]

Brianna wrote:

> I have noticed that the human-readable summary of the 'Attribution'
> condition has lead a few people to a belief about their 'right' to

The "Human Readable" summery of all of the licenses is misleading.
Maybe one of these days they will be corrected.

> This is how one user interpreted his 'right' to 'specify the manner' of 
> attribution:

That user hasn't a clue as to either the rights he retained, or gave away.

I don't know the ground rules for Wikimedia, but his entire corpus
would be removed from Wikipedia, for copyright/license infringement
reasons.  [Either the material is under CC-BY, or it is not.   His
stipulations are incompatible with CC-BY.]

> His line of thinking is not totally unreasonable if you only read the human 
> summary.

The Human Readable summary doesn't count.   What matters is the
wording of the legal code.   [Something I'll wager that the majority
of people have not read.   I suspect that even fewer of them
comprehend how it affects their art.]

> IMO a 'reasonable manner' of attribution for a digital work presented
> in a digital form is caption/alt-text with a link and text stating the

Since it is a digital image, the most reasonable manner of attribution
is to include it in the metadata of the image.   For printing of the
image, put it in a line.

The one thing that the user does do correctly, is define the words for
the attribution:  "Photograph by name_of_photographer".

> Just wondering if anyone else had flagged this wording as a potential cause 
> of confusion.

It gets brought up periodically.  The wording might get changed for
newer licenses.  [I don't pay attention to what the human readable
summary says.]

> "keep intact all copyright notices for the Work": does this mean if
> someone puts a watermark on their image "(C) Someone 2007
> SomeLicense", we are obliged to keep it? I hope not...

Yes you are.   One does not give up copyright by using a Creative
Commons license.   Furthermore, if the image does contain a watermark
"(C) somebody 2007", the attribution requirements for the image have
been met.  That just leaves the user of the image with the
responsibility of adding the URL.

xan

jonathon