This is a discussion from cc-licenses, the Creative Commons mailing list, that might be of interest to some. See the thread here: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2007-February/004960.html
I've also asked Larry Lessig for his thoughts on the matter. I think that if we cannot achieve this with CC-BY-SA, it may be necessary to create a stronger copyleft license that does. But the answer isn't clear yet, and it might be helpful if some Wikimedians weigh in on the discussion.
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---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org Date: Feb 9, 2007 4:44 AM Subject: Fwd: Share-Alike with images To: lessig@pobox.com
Hello Larry,
I have received no clear response to this on the cc-licenses mailing list. It would be helpful to discuss this a bit. If CC doesn't want to explicitly make copyleft apply to, e.g., the combination of an article and an image, it might be useful to create a separate, stronger copyleft license for this purpose.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org Date: Feb 5, 2007 3:01 AM Subject: Share-Alike with images To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts cc-licenses@lists.ibiblio.org
The Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license currently states:
"For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ('synching') will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License."
This is cool and helps to clarify copyleft in the context of music. What about the case where a photo is used in a newspaper or encyclopedia article? Like a musical piece in a movie, there is a clear semantic relationship between the two; one is directly enriched in its meaning by the other.
I think the license is currently ambiguous about such uses. However, I think it would be clearly in line with the copyleft philosophy to demand free licensing of the combined whole in such a case (not in the case of mere aggregation within e.g. a collection of photos where there's no semantic relationship between them). In my discussions with photographers, I've found that many use NC licenses because they worry about commercial exploitation of their works. If we could clarify copyleft in the context of images, many of these fears could be alleviated.
The simple fact is that a photo by itself is not likely to be modified much, especially if it's of very high quality to begin with. That's why I think it's important that we establish a clear and unambiguous reciprocity when images are used in larger works. Perhaps the movie-specific phrase in the current SA license text could be generalized:
"For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is semantically combined with another (a film with time-synchronized music, an article with pictures, and so on), the combined Work will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this license."
I don't think the "Collective Work" portion would need to be modified, as it already speaks of "separate and independent" works, which would be clarified by a phrase like the above. -- Peace & Love, Erik
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-- Peace & Love, Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
Erik Moeller wrote:
The simple fact is that a photo by itself is not likely to be modified much, especially if it's of very high quality to begin with. That's why I think it's important that we establish a clear and unambiguous reciprocity when images are used in larger works. Perhaps the movie-specific phrase in the current SA license text could be generalized:
"For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is semantically combined with another (a film with time-synchronized music, an article with pictures, and so on), the combined Work will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this license."
This would be problematic for our own uses unless the CC-BY-SA / GFDL compatibility issues are resolved. The wording of the cc-by-sa requires any derivative works to be distributed "only under a license identical to this one", but our own encyclopedia is licensed under a non-identical license, the GFDL. So we wouldn't be able to use CC-BY-SA images within Wikipedia under that license change, unless they're dual-licensed under the GFDL as well...
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
The simple fact is that a photo by itself is not likely to be modified much, especially if it's of very high quality to begin with. That's why I think it's important that we establish a clear and unambiguous reciprocity when images are used in larger works. Perhaps the movie-specific phrase in the current SA license text could be generalized:
"For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is semantically combined with another (a film with time-synchronized music, an article with pictures, and so on), the combined Work will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this license."
This would be problematic for our own uses unless the CC-BY-SA / GFDL compatibility issues are resolved. The wording of the cc-by-sa requires any derivative works to be distributed "only under a license identical to this one", but our own encyclopedia is licensed under a non-identical license, the GFDL. So we wouldn't be able to use CC-BY-SA images within Wikipedia under that license change, unless they're dual-licensed under the GFDL as well...
-Mark
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IANAL, but this shouldn't be an issue except possibly in print, because unlike text, images are a single file that will at most be reuploaded, and the only thing that would be a "derivative work" would be another image based on the original one. Therefore, the text of an article using CC-BY-SA images wouldn't have to be covered under that license, but anywhere where the image wasn't a discrete component (ie, print, or any format that distributes the entire pages as images (PDF?) it might apply.
Legal counsel could probably advise further on this, but I don't think it's too big of a deal.
-Stephanie
Stephanie Daugherty wrote:
IANAL, but this shouldn't be an issue except possibly in print, because unlike text, images are a single file that will at most be reuploaded, and the only thing that would be a "derivative work" would be another image based on the original one. Therefore, the text of an article using CC-BY-SA images wouldn't have to be covered under that license, but anywhere where the image wasn't a discrete component (ie, print, or any format that distributes the entire pages as images (PDF?) it might apply.
That is one possible interpretation of the current license, but I'm responding to Erik's proposal that the cc-by-sa license be changed to explicitly say that aggregating an image with text makes the resulting illustrated text a derivative work of the image.
-Mark
On 2/11/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
This would be problematic for our own uses unless the CC-BY-SA / GFDL compatibility issues are resolved. The wording of the cc-by-sa requires any derivative works to be distributed "only under a license identical to this one"
The license could make a distinction between works which are direct derivatives, and separate works which are used in a way where one semantically depends on the other. In the second case, it could allow them to be under separate licenses, as long as all component licenses are free content licenses.
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