Gerard writes:
When I talked to the Tropenmuseum about licensing
their material, I asked
Mike Godwin about this and I put this scenario explicitly to him. Material
is licensed by a copyright holder, he can do it repeatedly in different
ways
for different levels of quality.
As I read this, Gerard represents my view accurately. It's important to
remember that one aspect of (most) free licenses is that the original
licensor retains many rights with regard to the copyrighted work. Granting
multiple licenses to facilitate re-use in different contexts -- or different
media -- seems to me to be one solution to the problem that Birgitte raises,
which is that copyright is an area of law that treats very different media
as if they were the same (it's a "kludge," all right), which means there
are
almost always going to be edge cases (statues, architectural plans, etc.) in
which meeting the explicit requirements of a particular free license (such
as CC-BY-SA) is going to be tricky.
That said, the efforts of Creative Commons to try to standardize on basic
licensing language have done very much to make free culture freer -- by
giving creators and licensors easier ways to talk about what kinds of rights
they are trying to grant, and by increasing "interoperability" among freely
licensed works.
--Mike