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

Teofilo teofilowiki at gmail.com
Mon Feb 21 13:14:47 UTC 2011


2011/2/20 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
 (...)
>
> Well no. Because any such requirement would make it difficult to
> distribute such a video via conventional TV.

A video has been released by a creator who intends it for
free-software-like distribution: do you think it is good to allow
reusers to display this video on the internet with an embedded player
without a download link ?

I personally think it is not good, and although I have never created a
video myself, I guess that most creators would like to prevent this
from happening.

Restriction 4 (a) of CC-BY-SA 3.0 with "You may not impose any
effective technological measures" is aimed principally at DRMs and
probably cannot do much against the simple forgetfulness to add a
download link.

You may want to create a special clause for conventional TV (like
requiring the TV speaker, or the opening credits or the closing
credits to tell viewers that the video is otherwise available on the
TV's website for download). This is why a new, yet to be written, Free
Video License including this kind of clauses is needed.

For the time being, the less bad licenses for videos are the "Licence
art libre" with "specify to the recipient where to access the
originals (either initial or subsequent)" (1) (but it is not clear if
the word "recipient" applies only to distribution recipients or also
means performance viewers and audiences) and the GFDL, from where it
is possible to argue that an embedded player without a download link
might not be "transparent enough", and that public performance without
distribution is anyway not allowed by the GFDL, but that is far from
being an explicit way to have reusers understand what thay may or may
not do with the video.

(1) http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en




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