Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab AT web.de>]

Am Samstag, 7. Januar 2012, 12:05:21 schrieb David Chart:
> I don't think allowing conversion to the GPL is a good idea, and I don't
> think that GPL compatibility is possible.

I think different, and I get to different conclusions :)

> I think it would be a bad idea to allow works currently licensed under
> CC-BY-SA to be relicensed under the GPL. The authors releasing those works
> could have released them under the GPL, but chose not to. Having CC change
> that decision for them without consultation would be politically dangerous,

I think there are two groups of people: Those who chose by-sa, because it is
copyleft for artists and those who chose by-sa because it is not GPL.

What I can gather till now (please feel free to add to that)

1, copyleft:

1.1 They want their art to be usable for as many people as possible as long as
   the others share alike (so they can profit from improvements), or
1.2 They want to contribute to free culture, or
1.3 They want to reuse art by others and keep it free, or

2. non-GPL:

2.1 They don’t want the requirements of the GPL for practical reasons, or
2.2 They want to avoid copyleft for their own contributions.

1.1 get hurt by the missing compatibility to GPL, because their contributions
cannot be used by everyone who might be interested.
1.2 won’t care, as GPL is as free as by-sa in most situations.
1.3 get hurt by not being able to reuse GPL art.

2.1 would get hurt by GPL compatibility because that might make some people
use art with GPL licensed art and they would have to adhere the requirements
of the GPL if they wanted to use the combined work.
2.2 is not relevant in my opinion, because they want to circumvent the
cc by-sa license which makes them enemies of anyone who uses cc by-sa for its
copyleft.

The source must also be
> in a publicly-documented format with an available source code
> implementation. Even for electronic works, this is often not the case;
> artists who work in Photoshop, for example, cannot provide the preferred
> form for modifications in such a format, because the preferred form for
> modifications is a Photoshop file.

If we allow a slightly lax criterium for documented, the gimp import filters
might suffice as documentation and implementation to make the format accepted 
as
source format.

Just don’t use the most current version of the format when sharing.

> I also strongly doubt that you can get away with saying "whatever we have is
> the source code"; the language looks designed to exclude the binary blobs
> that come with some hardware

that is because these are not effectively editable.

A png or even a movie on the other hand can be edited to produce a massively
changed work which still works like the original work.

> I can see that it is inconvenient for video games

Don’t restrict it arbitrarily to video games. That’s just where the problem is
most visible. As I said, I have exactly that problem for a non-computer
roleplaying game. Essentially a PDF.

> , and that the original
> intent of the artists almost certainly was for the images to be usable in
> any video game, but I don't think that problem should be solved by changing
> the license.

How else should the problem be solved that the license does not fullfill what
people expect it would do? That’s either a bug in the legal code or in the
human readable version.

> Instead, you should get the works relicensed (should be no
> problem if the artists really did mean that)

in case you can actually reach them. Which often is not very likely. People
change email addresses and home addresses, and a big advantage of free
licensed works is that you don’t have to ask permission before reusing
anything.

> , or rewrite the code so that
> you can use artwork released under a different license, even a non-free
> one. I'm well aware that neither of those, particularly the second, is a
> trivial task...

Especially since that could very well mean, that licensing a blender file 
under
a cc license would be a license violation.

Would you really say that this is no bug in the license? After all blender is
the mayor free 3D creator and a huge source for cc licensed 3D models which in
turn get used in free movies and images.

Best wishes,
Arne
--
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