Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>While I do find there are times when publishing free-licensed images
>>alongside non-free text is desirable, this is not my main concern. For
>>such functionality, the CC-By license is nearly as good as CC-By-SA
>>anyway, so I agree with that point.
> 
> This has been my position.  I've not yet figured out the gaps which
> are preventing agreement from some others.

Okay, sure, here's the hole...

You speak of transformation of images as if it were all relatively
uncreative operations such as photo brightness/contrast enhancement or
cropping. However, such changes are probably not even enough to be
considered a "derivation" (i.e. they don't create a new work), so you
wouldn't be able to relicense them even under CC-By.

But there's a whole lot more you can do with bitmap images than that.
You can create them from scratch with painting tools. You can composite
multiple images into collages or creative juxtapositions of
images/ideas. You can use them in diagrams. And so on.

Even "retouching" a photo can be a complex and creative process.

Things get even more complex if you are primarily a vector artist (i.e.
someone who works with SVG drawings), which is something I do a lot of).

All of these operations produce highly creative, original work based on
prior elements which may have come from someone else. If I work with
CC-By and CC-By-SA work and license my own work CC-By-SA, then I'm doing
fine in the copyleft domain, and SA is doing its job.

I'm not particularly concerned about my resulting image appearing as,
say, an illustration for a news article or a book, or being used in
someone's blog. I don't plan to recover any income from those sources,
and they are not my motivation for creating the work (most likely I
needed it for a documentation project relating to some software or
hardware project).

However, if some professional layout artist does some work on that
drawing to make it look better for their purposes, then I want the right
to use their improvements if I want.

IOW, as far as I am concerned, illustrating text is "use" of the work,
while changing the drawing is "derivation". I have self-consciously
chosen to allow freedom of "use", but not of "derivation". So I'm pretty
happy with SA.

(There is a side issue here, which may be interesting to some -- an SVG
drawing isn't really all that different from HTML, except it's a little
more precise and a little more complex. Bitmap images when used in SVG
drawings are usually linked external files. Does the copyleft on the
images bind the SVG drawing? I think it does, but I'm not sure, because
SVG and HTML are actually very similar technically).

I don't feel this is a tiny niche case, either. I think this is THE
important use case of the CC-By-SA. Licensing your photos CC-By-SA
encourages artists in my position (who primarily work by juxtaposing
simpler visual elements) to license CC-By-SA. And my licensing CC-By-SA
encourages my work to stay under the CC-By-SA, even when it is modified
and (hopefully) improved, as well as enabling others to derive from my work.

I've argued elsewhere that this principally happens when the work is
utilitarian, but that's a side issue.

I regard the case of a photo, drawn from an online "free" photo
collection, used to illustrate text with no significant changes as
merely degenerate -- it's the 0-generational case. I grant you that the
CC-By-SA really doesn't do much more than the CC-By for that case. But
that's just because it's not an interesting example, not because there's
something wrong with CC-By-SA.

There are plenty of examples of GPL programs that never get edited by
anyone but their original author, too. That doesn't make it a bad
choice to have used the GPL.

Cheers,
Terry

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