Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 14:56 +1000, Brianna Laugher wrote:

> In a slightly related note I have been wondering about the wording
> "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...

I don't think that "keep intact" here means "keep in exactly the same
place and format." I think it means "retain verbatim" or possibly even
"retain the meaning of".

It would not be possible to keep a copyright notice in the same place
and format when performing a written play, for example. A similar issue
arises when adding music with an ID3 copyright tag to a film. In these
cases, you'd need to show the copyright notice in another format. Given
that the license references both these kinds of uses, it's unlikely that
the license authors intend them to be impracticable.

And this is a perfectly reasonable reading of "keep intact". After all,
what _is_ the copyright notice? Is it the collection of pixels, their
colors, and their spatial relationship? No! It's the text itself.

In fact, you could make a strong case that the "notice" is the *meaning*
of the text: that Brianna Laugher created this work in such-and-such a
year and claims a copyright to it. If you translated the copyright
notice into another language, or into some kind of structured
machine-readable format, that meaning would be "kept intact".

To take it a step further, you could even say that if one translated a
book into Russian or Chinese, but kept the copyright notice text in
English verbatim, the _intention_ of this clause is not being respected.
The intention being, of course, that typical readers should be notified
of the copyright information on the work. In other words, it could be
that a compliant derivative _must_ modify the copyright notice.

Enough flights of fancy and down to practical matters: it should be
perfectly OK to trim a watermark from an image and move it to one of the
several places that a typical user would expect to find it (e.g. EXIF
metadata, a caption). On the other hand, *hiding* a copyright notice
(e.g., steganographically embedding it in the image) would probably
violate the intention and spirit of this requirement.

I am not a lawyer; just the kind of reasonable and well-informed person
that would typically be the licensee.

-Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou - evan AT prodromou.name - http://evan.prodromou.name/

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