Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Tuesday 04 December 2007 00:04:14 Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Dec 3, 2007 11:53 AM, Jimmy Wales <jwales AT wikia.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > If you take my cc-by-sa image and modify it, I insist that your modified
> > version be made available under cc-by-sa.  If you merely use my image
> > *near* something else, then I do not insist that your entire work be
> > made available under cc-by-sa, because I do not believe that your
> > newspaper article is a "derivative work" of my photograph.
> > (There can be edge cases, of course, but they are a bit difficult to
> > construct.)
> > A desire for "strong copyleft" should not lead us into overly expansive
> > claims of copyright on interactions that do not actually constitute the
> > making of a derivative work.
>
> Jimmy, intentionally or not you're addressing a strawman.   No one
> *here* has advocated that any copyleft license would only permit you
> to use a covered work if everything 'near' it is freely licensed, as
> such it's not helpful to refute that position.

He may or may not be doing that and I may or may not be advocating the 
position he is speaking against. It is not exactly clear to me by his words.

My take is to require just that if the article / image combo gets / can get a 
copyright (or related right?) protection of its own. Hey, even if the whole 
newspaper can get a copyright, then I am proposing we at least consider 
requiring a compatible Free license on the whole things and compatible Free 
licenses on all siblings.

Now, if all you have is a bunch of siblings sitting on a disk on paper, but 
they coexist such that there is no "meta" copyright, no copyright on the 
collection, newspaper, whatever possible, then all bets are off and we do not 
speak to the copyright status of the siblings.
>
> The reason that we in the world of free content group should tolerate
> its imposition at all is because when used correctly copyleft has a
> substantial pay-off. Copyleft can create that little bit of friction
> needed to move people into the realm of freely licensing their own
> works.
>
> For example, a programmer is making a command line app and he wants
> command history and line editing ... if he freely licenses his work he
> can use GNU READLINE, saving himself about 30,000 lines of tricky
> programming.   If he doesn't freely license his work, he can write his
> own or find some other alternative, perhaps one that costs a bit of
> money.
>
> Likewise, consider a teacher writing a supplemental guide for a class.
> The teacher needs illustrations for the guide. They (or their
> institution) could pay a fee to use an image library, they could
> create their own images, or hire a photographer, or perhaps they could
> choose to freely license their work and gain access to copyleft
> illustrations which they can use to build their guide.
>
> In either of these cases, programming or educational materials, the
> majority of the copyrighted works created are never intended to be
> sold as a product. Freely licensing them is harmless. But because of
> the weak possibility of future income from these works, and simply
> because of the power of the default people usually do not choose to
> freely release these works.  Copyleft can create the needed incentive,
> and at the same time allow everyone feel like they are getting a fair
> deal.
>
> It's true that many copyleft licenses have additional characteristics.
> For example, they might help ensure that the original unmodified work
> doesn't somehow fall out of the free world.  But these effects can be
> achieved without copyleft.
>
> The exact functionality needed to make copyleft work the best differs
> from work to work. People use software applications in different ways
> from scientific illustrations or poetry.
>
> It's been my position, and that of at least several others here, that
> in the case of illustrations that copyleft somehow bound to the image
> borders doesn't accomplish much -- because the normal way the people
> build new works out of images is through synchronization, not internal
> modification.    Our experience on Wikimedia Commons is that, even for
> images taken from outside sources like flickr, we seldom make
> modifications to images themselves... and that the modifications which
> do get made are generally trivial (cropping, rotation, perhaps color
> correction).

I think all of this can be sorted by the "copyright arising" or "meta 
copyright" thinking.
>
> A copyleft that doesn't substantially encourage people to make more
> freely licensed works is just another copyright related imposition,
> it's harmful and without public or even private benefit and should be
> avoided.

You mean, just go with a straight Free without copyleft? I can see that 
reasoning.
>
> [quoting the part I removed from the top]
>
> > For many of us, we want to use cc-by-sa because we want the copyleft
> > provision, while at the same time, we do not intend to "overreach" by
> > claiming an expansive vision of "derivative work".
>
> I have no doubt that there are many people and companies who will
> profit greatly from the effective removal or substantial reduction of
> the copyleft status of many works in wikis currently under the GFDL.
> However, that isn't how the authors choose to license their works.

all the best,

drew