[Foundation-l] Requirements for a strong copyleft license

[Robert Rohde]

On Dec 2, 2007 2:30 PM, Benjamin Esham <bdesham at gmail.com> wrote:

> Brianna Laugher wrote:
>
> > Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> >
> > > The question of "does anyone here want a weak copyleft license" is
> just
> > > the far more interesting one...
> > >
> > > I do not believe there is any point to having a copyleft license for
> > > media which isn't strong.  Does anyone here disagree?
> >
> > At the risk of being stoned... yeah.  I just don't consider an article
> > that uses a photograph of mine as illustration to be a derivative of my
> > work. I don't want an article, blog or book author to have to license
> > their whole text under CC-BY-SA just because they use my image. HOWEVER,
> I
> > do want them to be obliged to make explicit the license of my work, that
> > is offer it to others under the same conditions.
>
> I strongly agree with this.  It is simply impossible for many content
> producers—for example, newspaper or textbook publishers—to release their
> entire works under a viral copyleft license, but including a CC-BY-SA
> photo
> with a mention of the license is perfectly acceptable.  I believe that an
> all-or nothing approach here will elicit a unanimous "nothing!" from these
> commercial content producers: requiring all reusers to release their stuff
> under CC-BY-SA will be unacceptable, and so they won't use *any* copyleft
> content.  We'd just be shooting ourselves in the foot.
>
> At the risk of stating the obvious, if commercial publishers are
unwilling/unable to make their works free then they shouldn't be including
any CC-BY-SA content.  If content creators don't want that outcome, they
should be using CC-BY rather than CC-BY-SA.

Having said that, I generally agree that it is functionally impossible to
reach an agreement on this matter, and it seems likely that the only way to
make progress is to create a CC-BY-SA-Strong to satisfy those of us who
believe that copyleft really should be viral.

-Robert A. Rohde