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(a)peacefire.org
http://www.peacefire.org
(425) 497 9002