On Dec 1, 2007 9:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
- Laurence Lessig has posted multiple times claiming that it is
acceptable to take illustrations licensed under CC-By-SA and produce combined works which are not freely licensed. For example, if I wrote a since instruction book and created illustrations on how to safely use a bunsen burner a commercial textbook publisher could use my illustrations in their textbook without giving anything back the the world of free content.
And this has exactly been our interpretation of the GFDL -- this is why we permit combining GFDL works with media under any license whatsoever (limited only by policy), because we regard the media and the text to be "separate and independent" as per the GFDL.
I believe what is needed is a new, strong copyleft license for "embedded media", which is unambiguously explicit about the consequences of embedding a photo into an article, or a sound clip into a video. I've already talked about this with Larry and other CC folks, and would be happy to see you join these conversations.
- The Creative Commons licenses come with misleading front cover
text.
This is easy to fix. Do you have a document that enumerates the changes you'd like to see made?
So these by-attribution licenses don't actually provide attribution if a service provider specifies so in their terms of service.
As far as I can tell it's pretty clear: The copyright holder determines whether or not they want to designate someone else for the purpose of attribution -- and a participatory website like a wiki can _require_ such designation. Wikinews actually does: On the edit screen, it states that you agree that your edits will be attributed "to Wikinews".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Creative Commons added this option specifically to _help_ wiki communities in making attribution more manageable. They originally wanted to create a CC-WIKI license for this purpose, but instead modified their existing licenses to be more flexible.
It seems to me that CC has a history of addressing stakeholder needs. If we were to adopt one of their licenses, we would instantly become one of the most significant, if not the most significant, stakeholders -- and I do believe our concerns would be taken very seriously, as I think they already are.
I really hope that your response to this decision will not be antagonism but engagement and feedback. There's basically, as far as I can see, two likely outcomes:
- The Wikimedia community will support an immediate switch to CC-BY-SA, and the critics of the license will dig themselves into a position of extreme antagonism, asking their contributions to be removed, etc. - The Wikimedia community will work together in trying to help Creative Commons to improve CC-BY-SA, and then make the switch.
I would prefer the second scenario over the first; I do think you have legitimate concerns that we should try to work on. Please help us to make that possible.