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

Sun Dec 2 01:53:15 UTC 2007

On Dec 1, 2007 8:22 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> One open issue is the way both the GFDL and CC-BY-SA deal with
> embedded media files like images, sounds, and videos.
[snip]
> The actual clauses are very similar, however, and I believe what is
> really needed is a license that gives authors the choice of "strong
> copyleft" for embedded media: the work into which the media are
> embedded (whether either work is text, sound, film, a rich media mix,
> or whatever) should be licensed under a copyleft license.

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.

When it comes to photographs and other still, and especially raster,
illustrations the predominate forms of reuse are verbatim. When there
are modifications within the frame of time image they are generally so
trivial that they can be easily reproduced by anyone who is
interested.

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?

Certainties the world does not yet YET ANOTHER free content license if
it can be avoided.  The already existing myriad of CC licensing knobs
already create confusion enough as is. :(