Development of Creative Commons licenses

[David Chart <bydosa AT davidchart.com>]

On 2012/04/22, at 2:03, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> (1) The text would be an extension of the photographs, for example by 
> describing them, or

That's a clear case, and would be covered by the CC-BY-SA licence as well, I 
think. (Beyond the level of description that counts as fair use, of course.)

> (2) The book could be a combined creative work (depends on a court seeing 
> the 
> name program apply to any kind work).

I have to say that the chances of that happening strike me as somewhere 
between "slim" and "none". There is just no linguistic precedent for calling 
an illustrated book a program.

> 
> The second case would hit in any case where the photographs are not just 
> selected at random but selected to fit the text *and form a larger whole*.
> 
> So the only way to create an unfree book which uses your GPL photographs 
> would 
> be to create a *bad* book. Like a documentation of Mauna Loa using random 
> images from Seattle and Berlin. 
> 
> As soon as the theme of the images fits the text, it’s no mere aggregation 
> anymore and they have to adhere the copyleft.

I think it's much more analogous to binary kernel modules than an extension 
to a larger program. A binary kernel module is obviously not written at 
random, or with no reference to the rest of the kernel.

If "selection to fit a larger whole" creates a copyleft obligation, it should 
be impossible to have Linux distributions that include unfree, or even 
free-but-GPL-incompatible, software, because a Linux distribution is a larger 
whole.

I do think drew is right to believe that the GPL does not, in fact, do what 
he wants. The current usages of the licence strongly suggests it doesn't.

-- 
David Chart
http://www.davidchart.com/