Creative Commons and Derivative Works: That Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
Applying a CC license and then saying, but really, I mean this … I think you can do it legally, but it sort of makes the whole CC scheme…broken. I mean, if you choose a no-derivs license and then say, well, except you can make fan art and write fanfiction, you appear to have chosen the wrong license. [Also, also, when you say you are cool with fanfiction but you don't want people adding chapters to the end, you are very confusing. I think (after referring to the paragraph on fan art twelve times) what he means is that he does not want people inserting fanfiction into the original or attaching it to copies of the original as if it were part of the original, but not that he is specifically forbidding fanfiction stories which take place during the time period of the novel or immediately subsequent to it.]
(cleolinda also gets her CC license spectacularly, hilariously backwards: she whacks a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License notice on her movie reviews and then says reposting is wrong, but journal icons are OK. For those who are unaware, the license in question expressly permits copying (as all CC licenses do) but forbids work which "builds upon" the original, which makes those darn journal icons questionable.
Her note that you can use short quotes to refer back to the original? I know that the New York Publishing Cabal, the Music Publisher Syndicate, and the Film and Television Oligarchy have joined forces to try to do away with same, but in the United States, fair use actually does exist, and a short quote in order to discuss the larger work is pretty much the most classic and basic example of it in all of copyrightland. She can't grant a right you already have, dear reader. Or rather, she can grant it, but it doesn't give her the power to take away the right either.)
I wish CC would have a more sophisticated discussion of what exactly a derivative work is (I know, I know: legal questions are hard), and a licensing scheme which allowed for the licensing of some derivative works but not others. (I also, actually, wish there were CC licenses that permitted derivative works but not copying. None of the CC licenses do this. I wrote and asked.)
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(cleolinda also gets her CC license spectacularly, hilariously backwards: she whacks a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License notice on her movie reviews and then says reposting is wrong, but journal icons are OK. For those who are unaware, the license in question expressly permits copying (as all CC licenses do) but forbids work which "builds upon" the original, which makes those darn journal icons questionable.
Her note that you can use short quotes to refer back to the original? I know that the New York Publishing Cabal, the Music Publisher Syndicate, and the Film and Television Oligarchy have joined forces to try to do away with same, but in the United States, fair use actually does exist, and a short quote in order to discuss the larger work is pretty much the most classic and basic example of it in all of copyrightland. She can't grant a right you already have, dear reader. Or rather, she can grant it, but it doesn't give her the power to take away the right either.)
I wish CC would have a more sophisticated discussion of what exactly a derivative work is (I know, I know: legal questions are hard), and a licensing scheme which allowed for the licensing of some derivative works but not others. (I also, actually, wish there were CC licenses that permitted derivative works but not copying. None of the CC licenses do this. I wrote and asked.)
All comments at Dreamwidth. Please reply to this entry there or read others' comments.