Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell AT gmail.com>]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 8:59 AM, drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com> wrote:
> Well, I know for me, if we don't make a reasonable stab at making the 
> copyleft
> aspects of BY-SA stronger this round, I am thinking seriously of adopting
> BY-NC-SA for my photos and such with an additional permission to use the 
> work
> for commercial purposes so long as the resulting work also grants the same
> commercial waiver. I would hate to do this but... We shall see.

I've never felt that the actual language of the license was especially 
deficient
in this regard— certainly both the common practices and the guidance are
not good.

Are you more concerned about the fine boundary where e.g. the inclusion
of a photo being mere aggregation or an adaptation is disputable, or are
you more concerned about the fact that the copyleft is ignored even where
this question does not exist?

Could your concern be addressed by adding or reworking the  "will be
considered an Adaptation" (cc-by-sa-3.0 language) text?

If your concern is, in fact, about the boundary between aggregation and
adaptation— then fixing it with the NC + permissions may be messy too.
Certainly,  though of us who are strongly pro-copyleft would be sending
a very mixed message by using NC— a very unfortunately restrictive
license which is already overused by people who pick without good information
—in any way.

As a photographer myself— it's worth pointing out that the vast majority
of the commercial use of photography is for illustrating other copyrighted
works.  If a copyleft license is not able to provide _some_ incentive
for the creators of these derivative works to also freely license their works
then the copyleft provides little value at all.

After handling hundreds of licensing requests (for textbooks, advertising,
decorations, etc) for my photographs over the years, only last week did
I receive a request for licensing substantial modifications of the work
rather than the more customary illustrative uses, and a bit ironically: I
felt the usage so thoroughly transformation that I released it with no
conditions at all.