Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Tuesday 24 January 2012 12:59:33 Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> drew Roberts dijo [Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 01:28:28PM -0500]:
> > (...)
> >
> > > On the philosophical point, if the GPL can already be used for any
> > > creative works, then there is no need for a CC license doing the same
> > > thing.
> >
> > There is a need for all copyleft Free works to be mixable. It may not be
> > possible. It likely isn't possible in all cases, but it is needed.
>
> There are ways to ship them together without making them into one
> indivisible work.

Take on gpl photograph and one by-sa photograph amd make a combined work as a 
print.

It likely isn't possible in all cases, but it is needed.
>
> If you want your work to be able to be mixed into a GPL project,
> either you or the other project's authors would have to (at least)
> dual-license.

And if both photographs have become orphan works?
>
> However, you *can* (and it's done quite often) ship i.e. a tarball
> including GPLed files, CC-BY-SAed files, and so on.

There is certainly a sub-set of problems with copyleft incompatibilities that 
can be solved as things stand today.
>
> > > The
> > > claim that a truly free work must come with the source is thus not
> > > relevant to the question of how the CC licenses should be revised.
> >
> > This statement can't really be evaluated properly until we can properly
> > define source for all cases. So far, I have seen no serious attempts to
> > do this.
>
> Ok. What would you define as the source for the "Metropolis" movie? I
> don't think it has a source. It is an intellectual/artistic work set
> in long-term preservable media, it can be reproduced and archived. But
> even having the script and the measures for all of the artwork used on
> the set, no matter what, you will not be able to recreate it.
>
> Same thing for Picasso's Guernica — Would we need yet another
> slaughtered village to lead to its creation? Thankfully no. Does
> slaughting a village lead to the creation of a Guernica? Clearly
> no. What is the source for the painting? The painting has no source:
> The painting is an expression, and that's what it is.
>
> Our creative brains are not finite-state machines. We, as humans, are
> not fed a series of inputs to produce a predictably equivalent
> output. Source, thus, has no meaning in many creative situations.

I don't see a need to argue with this.

I am the one saying that we should not think of putting a general source 
requirement into the 4.x+ by-sa license until we can generally define source 
for all copyrighted works and I have my doubts that we will find it.

You take the stronger position that we will not be able to find it.

Unless you thing we should stick a source requirement into the next by-sa 
anyway, we are practically on the same page on that one.

I do think we might consider inserting a conditional source requirement into 
the next by-sa along the lines that if the licensed work is code or a 
computer program, source is required along the lines of the gpl or even the 
agpl.
>
> > (...)
> > I don't buy this and I think it may be a dangerous argument. If I release
> > a program I wrote in binary form and do not release the source but put
> > the program under the GPL, it is under the GPL. Since no one else holds
> > copyrights to the program, no one can force me to give them source
> > (perhaps a weakness of copyright law?) but they can make copies for
> > themselves, they can rewrite it and release that source when they
> > distribute the new executable.
>
> No, sorry, you are wrong here. If you are the author, of course, you
> are free to do as you wish. Give me your binaries licensed under the
> GPL. However, I cannot redistribute them

That is correct. But you can make as many copies as you like for personal 
reasons. You can also illegally distribute binaries and those who get binary 
copies from you also now have the right to make as many copies as they like 
for personal reasons. I can't come after you or them for the personal copies. 
I can come after you for distributing binaries only. Well, perhaps only if 
someone asks for source and you don't comply. I am not sure how that would 
play in court though.

The point is though, I don't see the situation of a defective gpl setup 
falling back to ARR instead.

> - As for the creation of the 
> binaries (in a computer programming environment) there *is* the need
> of a source code.

Certainly there is a need for the source code here. It would be bogus of me 
to 
distribute my original program under the gpl and keep the source but you 
would still have the binary from me under the gpl. It would not become an ARR 
binary just because I was being a jerk.

> And if I don't have the source code (for your 
> program), I cannot comply with your licensing conditions (distribute
> the binaries together with the sources). You can of course give it to
> me, as it is your right as the copyright holder, but I cannot further
> redistribute it.
>
all the best,

drew