[Foundation-l] Licenses' biodiversity : my big disagreement with the Wikimedia usability initiative's software specifications

[geni]

On 20 February 2011 17:26, Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> But on Wikimedia Commons we are not dealing with a specific sector. We
> are receiving a variety of contents from different creative worlds. By
> the same token that you do not use the same legal code for a wedding
> contract and for a car purchase,

That's because marriage isn't strictly speaking a contract.

>I am not sure if the same contract
> can be used for a bronze statue and a for a song. I don't think you
> may address the mold issue for the statue exactly the same way as the
> musical score issue for the song.

Since both are covered under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988 I think the courts would beg to differ.

> I think it would be a mistake to narrow on a single license, while
> there is still no good license for videos. No license at present
> ensures that the distributors will provide a download link together
> with the video, whenever they distribute it.

Well no. Because any such requirement would make it difficult to
distribute such a video via conventional TV. Film is probably even
worse. And thats before we get into the really fun stuff. Are
Zoetropes videos? Flip books?


Your argument appears to be based on the idea that CC-BY-SA breaks
down under certain conditions. This is true. There are very few
licences around that I can't effectively break by applying weird
corner cases.

The thing is CC-BY-SA does far better than most. I can produce some
absolutely crazy situations under GFDL. The source code requirement in
the GLP can face some serious problems with working out what that term
even means. An older version of the FAL had some interesting
conditions with regards to what you could do with the original work.

Thing is I can generate even worse problems if you give me multiple
licenses to play with so you are far better off working on suggestions
to improve the various creative commons licenses rather than trying to
push yet more alternatives.



-- 
geni