On 2/10/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@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).