[Foundation-l] Proposal: Commons Force

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 6:10 PM, <wiki-lists at phizz.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Sage Ross wrote:
>>
>> If a copyleft license is being violated, that is potentially of
>> concern beyond the two legal parties, since properly using the license
>> would mean that derivative works are also part of the commons and
>> available for others to use and adapt.
>
>
> The problem is that YOU have no knowledge whether a copyleft license is
> being violated or not. It is a gross arrogance on your part presume that
> because it is CC-BY-SA in one context that all such uses must be CC-BY-SA.
>
> If someone write a piece of music and releases it under a CC-BY-SA
> license, they can also allow uses under other conditions. Now assume
> that you hear that music in some TV advert is the advert CC-BY-SA? Not
> if the creator of the music relicensed it to the advertizer minus the
> copyleft requirement. Being an outsider to the agreement between the two
> parties you simple do not know.
>

In many cases it's very obvious.  If an image credit says "Sage
Ross/Creative Commons" (with no link or no indication of which CC
license), it's clear that it's not being used properly.  If the image
credit says merely "Wikipedia" and you know that the version on
Wikipedia is under a copyleft license, it's again clear.

Yes, there are some situations where you can't know (without asking
the creator) that an image wasn't separately licensed.  But there are
a lot of times when you can know.

-Sage