[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Requirements for a strong copyleft license

[Anthony]

On Dec 2, 2007 8:57 AM, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/12/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > If a visual artist doesn't want copyleft for images they should just
> > use CC-BY (or better, 'PD').
> >
> > The purpose of copyleft is to help expand the pool of free content
> > with a tit-for-tat mechanism.  'Weak copyleft'  simply isn't
> > interesting in terms of its ability to achieve this goal.
>
> Is "weak copyleft" not comparable to the LGPL? LGPL appears to have a
> place; why not "weak copyleft"?
>
I think the argument is specific to images, which tend not to have as
significant of copyrightable changes made to them as software
libraries.  Sure, maybe a newspaper cleans up an image, lowers the
resolution, and converts it to black and white before including the
image in the newspaper, but this is not a significant creative change,
so the benefit of having those changes released under a free license
is negligible.

For software libraries, weak copyleft serves a purpose.  For text,
weak copyleft serves a purpose.  For images, much less so.