On Dec 2, 2007 6:24 PM, Fred Benenson fred.benenson@gmail.com wrote:
Question for the lawyers here -- even if we *wanted* to add stronger copyleft to a CC license, say creating CC-BY-SA+, could we?
Isn't the whole problem here that the licenses rely on the various definitions of "derivative works" for different mediums?
That is, the GPL can have strong copyleft because including source from other GPL works into a new work necessarily creates a derivative work, and same with music getting synched to video (or vice versa) with respect to CC-BY-SA -- in all of these cases a derivative work is created and the license stipulates that derivative works must be licensed under the same license.
The reason this has good legal force is because "derivative work" has a strict and specific definition in law that was formed completely independently of the GPL and CC.
As I'm sure everyone who's been following this thread to this point knows, there isn't much precedent for determining whether embedded images in text creates a derivative work. In the US there are some cases that establish that doing so *does* create a derivative work, and some cases that say that doing so *does not* create a derivative work. So that isn't much help.
So would we be creating our own definition of a derivative work so that we could apply stricter copy left?
This is troubling because whatever definition we might come up with, it surely wouldn't have the legal precedent and force that the definition of "derivative work" does in actual US copyright law.
F
PS: I just had the WSJ use one of my BY-SA photos in an article giving me only attribution, so I'm acutely interested in this topic.
I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion, it is certainly possible to tie future licensing to use. Rather than tying it to the technical meaning of a "derivative work", you tie it to the more fundemental right to distribute. In other words, one could say something like: "You may not use or distribute this image unless any accompanying text is licensed under X, Y, or Z".
Obviously a formal license needs a lot more detail to address the variety of embeddable media, the limits of defining acompanying text versus independent collections, and other issues. However, the basic effect of a license is to tell others when and other what conditions material can be used. There would appear to be no fundemental reason that one of those conditions couldn't be applying a free license to linked materials.
-Robert A. Rohde