At 04:56 PM 8/10/2008, Thomas Dalton wrote:
Are you saying that even if someone else published a work under CC-BY, you couldn't publish a derivative work as a Knol article, even if you attributed the base work to the author as required by CC-BY, and published it under Knol's own CC-BY licensing option?
That's my understanding, yes.
Would it be, not because you can't re-mix a CC-BY work into your own CC-BY work (everyone says you can do this), but because you can't grant *Google* the unlimited right to create "derivative works", because that would include derivative works that don't include the CC-BY attribution?
I'm not entirely sure. Depending on jurisdiction, there may well be moral rights to attribution granted by law in addition to whatever rights are reserved when granting the license, so that might not even be an issue. I think it's simply a matter of you not being able to grant a license to someone else's work, regardless of what that license says. If it's a derivative work, then it might be ok, since you're the copyright holder of that work and it just contains, under license, someone else's work. What people have been doing, however, is just copying stuff straight from Wikipedia onto Knol and no modifying it at all, it that case it isn't a derivative work it's just copying the original work and you certainly can't grant Google a license to that.
I would assume that if user A grants everyone in the world a license to do X, Y, and Z, then you're allowed to submit your work to company Q which requires you to agree to terms that say "YOU give us permission to do X, Y, and Z". Even though the permission is technically not yours to give.
Because, logically, if you did interpret it this way, what could possibly happen that anyone could sue for? If you grant company Q the right to do X, Y, and Z and company Q actually does one of those things, user A can't claim they were wronged, because they granted the whole world the right to do X, Y and Z anyway.
-Bennett
bennett@peacefire.org http://www.peacefire.org (425) 497 9002
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