[Commons-l] Fwd: Share-Alike with images

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 2/10/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmm... I wouldn't consider some writing illustrated with an image of
> mine to be a deriviative work of my image. I agree with Rob who said
> "The combination is collective/aggregate, not derivative." That would
> mean some articles on Wikipedia are CC-BY-SA as well as GFDL, and no
> one's ever suggested that...
> If CC's "SA" were to acquire this meaning, we'd have to disallow it
> for all Wikimedia projects that are GFDL, wouldn't we?

Then why would you use a copyleft license at all for a completed image?

It is important that copyleft licenses are sufficiently strong.
A weak copyleft license may not due the world much good: We accept the
slight extra burden of copyleft because it expands the pool of Free
Content by requiring an equitable trade when someone creates a new and
enhanced work using a copylefted work.   A copyleft that allows you to
enhance a proprietary work with a free once doesn't achieve that goal:
It is probably not a good bargain.

Even if we ignore the (lacking) wisdom of creating 'weak' copyleft
licenses it still would require a fairly new and styled interpretation
of copyleft to say that the combination of an image and an associated
text into a semantically coherent whole is not a derivative. Copyleft
licenses are not sometimes called 'viral' completely without cause
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#Is_copyleft_.22viral.22.3F  ,
although viral is something of a mischaracterization: Copyleft only
infects the willing).

That the Creative Commons would allow the CC-By-SA to become a weak
copyleft indeed (through later versions or just their interpretations
of the text) will be a total shock to some,  and a complete non-shock
to others.

> Rob also said "People just don't expect to see their BY-SA photographs
> "linked" to proprietary articles..." well I would be happy to! I guess
> "proprietary" works are not exactly equivalent to "commercial" works,
> but they are pretty close. I always push this point to other users,
> that using CC-BY-SA means accepting your work might turn up in
> commercial works...if you accept that, it's not a big shock to get to
> proprietary works.

Egads!

A proprietary work is an entirely separate beast than a commercial work.

With a proprietary work, the distributor denies you and everyone else
substantial and important freedoms with how you use the work.

With a commercial work, the distributor only gives the work to people
whom compensate him for his labors.

These concepts are completely orthogonal.

> I think of derivative works of images as crops
> image adjustments such as colour balance
> montages
> conversions to other formats (eg SVG)
> ... that's about it.

Save the last, these are all trivial modifications which could easily
be performed again against the original free work. They would most
likely not pass the threshold of creativity required to earn their own
copyright in any case.   The value of making sure these derivatives
are as free as the original is of very limited value to the overall
pool of free works

(Although .. a montage is a derivative, but an article written around
an illustration would not be?  This seems inconsistent to me).