Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab AT web.de>]

At Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:07:52 +0900,
David Chart wrote:
> > (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.

Why should it be called a program? It is a derivative work, that should 
suffice.

> > 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.

IMO only within limits (see the answer to drew for details)

> 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.

I also see some weaknesses there, and I think they should be fixed on the GPL 
side instead of creating a cc license which is essentially a GPL that works 
for creative works, but not for programs.

If you look at the example of fonts, you already see that they fullfill that: 
A GPL font requires documents which use it to be GPL, too. That’s why there 
is a font-exception: 

* http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_font_exception

Best wishes,
Arne