[Commons-l] Requirements for a strong copyleft license

Benjamin Esham bdesham at gmail.com
Sun Dec 2 22:30:36 UTC 2007


Brianna Laugher wrote:

> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> 
> > The question of "does anyone here want a weak copyleft license" is just
> > the far more interesting one...
> > 
> > I do not believe there is any point to having a copyleft license for
> > media which isn't strong.  Does anyone here disagree?
> 
> At the risk of being stoned... yeah.  I just don't consider an article
> that uses a photograph of mine as illustration to be a derivative of my
> work. I don't want an article, blog or book author to have to license
> their whole text under CC-BY-SA just because they use my image. HOWEVER, I
> do want them to be obliged to make explicit the license of my work, that
> is offer it to others under the same conditions.

I strongly agree with this.  It is simply impossible for many content
producers—for example, newspaper or textbook publishers—to release their
entire works under a viral copyleft license, but including a CC-BY-SA photo
with a mention of the license is perfectly acceptable.  I believe that an
all-or nothing approach here will elicit a unanimous "nothing!" from these
commercial content producers: requiring all reusers to release their stuff
under CC-BY-SA will be unacceptable, and so they won't use *any* copyleft
content.  We'd just be shooting ourselves in the foot.

Regards,
-- 
Benjamin D. Esham
E-mail/Jabber: bdesham at gmail.com | AIM bdesham128 | PGP D676BB9A
"Given that sooner or later we're all just going to die, what's
the point of learning about integers?"                  — Calvin




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