Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Tarmo Toikkanen <tarmo.toikkanen AT aalto.fi>]

Could the simple solution be to add "provided the work also complies with any requirements of said compatible license" somewhere?

-- 

Tarmo Toikkanen

tarmo.toikkanen AT aalto.fi

Learning Environments research group, http://legroup.aalto.fi

Aalto university, http://www.aalto.fi

On Wednesday 20. 02 2013 at 19.50, "Carlos Solís" wrote:

One of the topics commented for the discussion of the CC 4.0 licenses is

the option to give a one-way compatibility between the CC-By-SA and the

GPL. At a first glance, it looks like a great idea, which would allow more

intercompatibility between free licenses, but there is an issue with the

GPL's requirement to provide complete corresponding source code.

First of all, there's no consensus on what can be taken as the source code

of every license-able work. For written works, it would be the editable

file (in Word format, for example). But what about audiovisual works?

Usually those are composed by several raw files (variously named "stems",

"assets", "resources", and so on). Except for photographs (where there is

only one raw file, unedited except for the color balance), most other

works of this kind are composed themselves by several files, and the set

of commands that are used to combine them (the project file for audio and

video, the image editor's full file for images). And then there's the

question of how much must be an individual asset edited, in order to

require the release of both the original file and the commands to edit it.

Secondly, as it should be well-known, most works under CC licenses

(especially audiovisual works) don't release the source code, either

because of the size of the files, or because those files weren't preserved

at all. Also, the GPL requires that the assets and project files are "in a

format that is publicly documented (and with an implementation available

to the public in source code form), and must require no special password

or key for unpacking, reading or copying". This outlaws releasing the

project if it was made with non-free software (like Photoshop, Word, Sony

Vegas and many more).

That leaves two options for relicensing: allowing it only if those works

already comply with releasing full corresponding source, or else

retroactively forcing authors to comply with the new license terms. The

latter, however, would impose additional requirements to the authors in a

retroactive fashion, and it may be difficult or impossible for them to

comply (for example, by remaking the file in a free software tool). And to

make things worse, it would also require the original author to

recursively impose the same requirement on all the authors of all the

assets used on the work.

This doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any compatibility with the GPL,

but it must be limited to works that already comply with the GPL's

requirement for source code (here meaning full assets, full instructions

for editing the assets in their final form, and all files under a free

format). This would prevent legal issues with the derivative GPL works,

and avoid to impose terms retroactively on authors that may not be located

or may not release the source on the required terms.

- Carlos Solís

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