On Dec 2, 2007 9:24 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
[snip]
I write copyrighted work X. You create and distribute a new work, Y, which includes X. Because your work *includes* my work you are subject to the copyright-related restrictions and obligations related to the distribution of my work. Without a license (or fair use...), your distribution is a copyright infringement. I may offer you a license which contains many types of requirements which must be met in order for the license to be valid. End of story.
It is sometimes interesting to ask if work Y is still encumbered by X's copyright obligations even if X is not directly included (for example, what if Y was a translation of text X into another language). In these cases you might actually have a complicated issue on your hands, although not generally for a translation. The case law on these matters is idiosyncratic and very dependent on the type of work in question. But this is not generally the question of interest when we discuss copyleft licenses for photographic works or audio recordings.
Issues like this common confusion about the role of 'derivative' works with respect to copyleft are part of the reason why GPLv3 uses novel language (with internal definitions) to describe many concepts ('propagate', 'convey', etc).