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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Most important feature: GPL-compatibility

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Greg London"<email AT greglondon.com>
  • To: "Development of Creative Commons licenses"<cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>, "Development of Creative Commons licenses"<cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Most important feature: GPL-compatibility
  • Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2012 18:33:33 -0500

copyleft licences protect content by saying the content can be copied, derived, and distributed only if they are distributed under the exact same license as the original.

This means you cannot distribute under a more restrictive license like all rights reserved. And it also means you cannot distribute under a more permissive license like public domain (because public domain then allows derivatives to be distributed under all rights reserved).

By carving out a license that only allows distribution under the exact same license, that license creates a 'commons' inside of which the work is protected from being taken private.

By its design, copyleft licenses are inherently incompatible with different copyleft licenses by virtue of the fact that the protection they provide springs from the rigidity of the license.

gnu-gpl and gnu-lgpl are very similar in most respects (source code requirements, no patents, no drm, etc) but are different in where they draw the line in what constitutes a 'derivative' that requires the licence apply to the entire work, and what is considered a 'collection' and therefore does not require the license be applied to the entire collection.

Those licenses are not interchangable. You cannot download some content that is gnu-gpl and simply redistribute it as gnu-lgpl. They are not the same license and they do not allow switching back and forth willy nilly.

Because copyleft creates a commons by a rigid license that does not allow more or less restrictions than the original work.

If you have content that is gpl and content that is cc-sa, you cannot combine them into a singular work under a singular license.

What you MAY be able to do is figure out some way to have cc-sa be like gnu-lgpl because gnu-lgpl content can be distributed with gnu-gpl content.  lgpl says a derivative ends where code is linked in with other code. There would need be a more subjective way to draw that line for things like images and music and video and so on. Then the SA works would be like a library distributed with a gnu-gpl code.

The main thing that prevents gnu-gpl from applying to everything is that the individual pieces with different licenses are shipped as a collection and then thelose pieces are compiled by the individual user into the final work.

For a gpl video game using cc-sa content images, you would have to figure out how to make the SA images work as a library, ship them unassembled/uncompiled as a collection, and them have the user compile them locally on their computer.

The main escape hatch on GNU-GPL is that it only requires the license apply to the entire work if you DISTRIBUTE it as a singular work.  If you distribute a movie or a video game and any piece is GNU-GPL then everything must ne gnu-gpl. But if you distribute the individual components as a collection, then those components can have incompatible licenses so long as you distibute them as a collection and only do the compile step on your local computer.

For a video game this wont be horribly bad as the user will have to have a computer to do the compile with so they will have the hardware they need.  For somehing like a movie, this may be a problem because the only people who can watch the movie would be people with a computer that can compile the pieces into the final work.

For certain content, it should be possible to have it be handled as a library. For example,  the game engine for a first person shooter game might consider the images/bitmaps to be independent data. The bad guys can look like nazis or storm troopers or supervillian minions or whatever. the engine doesnt care. The image files are just libraries.

This ought be possible if cc-sa can figure out a way to act like a library within gpl works and if the content can be distributed as a collection and can be compiled by the end user.  but it can be a bit of a legalistic hack.

In the end, rather than do this kind of hack, it is better in the long run if works are made available under the correct license.  i.e. the same license as all the other works.

For software, copyleft is useless without a source code requirement. If you want to make some art to be used in a copyleft videogame, then the game source code should be gnu-gpl because gpl has a source code requirement, and therefore the easiest license for you art and imagework would be gnu-gpl too.







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-----Original message-----
From: Anthony <osm AT inbox.org>
To:
Development of Creative Commons licenses <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent:
Mon, Jan 2, 2012 21:15:26 GMT+00:00
Subject:
Re: [cc-licenses] Most important feature: GPL-compatibility

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 7:10 AM, Francesco Poli
wrote:
> But CC-by is incompatible with the GNU GPL, as confirmed by the FSF.

Is it possible to address the incompatibility directly? What is it?
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