A interesting note about using CC 2.0 content to make art for OGA
This may be of interest to some people. I was poking around in the CC-BY and CC-BY-SA 2.0 legal code, and there's an important clause covering adaptations (that is, derivative works) that works in OGA's favor:
4(b). You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License, or a Creative Commons iCommons license that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Japan). [...] (emphasis mine)
What this means to us is that, while we can't accept CC 2.0 works on their own (due to incompatibilities with libre software), it's possible to create derivative works of those works and license them under the 3.0 licenses. What this means is that, for example, you can grab CC-BY 2.0 photos off of Flickr (seriously, wtf, I thought they supported the 3.0 licenses the last time I looked. Maybe I'm going crazy...), transform them into tiling textures, and release those textures under CC-BY 3.0 (or later) -- the same goes for CC-BY-SA 2.0 -> 3.0. The important caveat is that you must transform the work in some way. If you just post the original work, that's not a derivative, and you're not allowed to just update the license without permission from the author.
Comments
Interesting :).
Yippy!!!
Cool. But I think the word you were going for was: "adaptations".
Thanks. For some reason, firefox doesn't highlight misspellings in the rich text widget.
Yeah, I've wondered why that is too. You can always right-click on highlighted text and select "Check Spelling" though.
Technically speaking, cropping an image is a derivative work right? Or even altering a single pixel.
TNo, it isnt. The change has to be substantial in some way to qualify as a derivative work.
@redshrike: these issues are way too vauge. What is substantial? What if I made a change, which does not constitute as substantial, may I distribute it with the orginal author name?
IANAL but something as simple as turning a png into a lossy jpeg might be considered substantial, as there is an enormous amount of data lost in the transition :P
You're overthinking it.
Just because there is a grey area doesn't mean that you can't avoid it. If a change is trivial, then it's probably not enough. Saving as a jpeg isn't a substantial change.
This isn't a lawyer opinion, but one way you might think of it is the amount of effort it takes to transform something. If you can do it in three seconds, it's probably not a substantial change, unless that three seconds is spent scribbling all over the image so that it's unrecognizeable. Saving as a jpeg or changing a single pixel don't count, because it's still virtually identical to the original work.
Turning a non-tiling texture into a tiling one, on the other hand, is a substantial change. It requires effort, and it makes the work different and also usable for something where it wasn't usable in the past.
Edit: One other note: The law is interpreted by people, not computers. If you're trying to think of this in a programmatic way (that is, can I run it through a comparison algorithm and determine if a change is 'substantial') then you're going to get nowhere. Imagine you're a judge in court examining two works. You aren't all that knowledgeable about computers -- your job is just to look at two works and determine whether they're similar. If you're annoyed at the person who made the derivative work because it doesn't look any different, then the changes aren't substantial. If you're annoyed at the author for bringing the case into court because the two works are clearly different, then it's substantial. :)
IMO, even changing one pixel counts as transforming the work. It seems like a fair mechanism to allow artists to recieve credit where its due for their original work, while at the same time allowing them to freely give their hard work back to the community.
This is, however, not a matter of individual opinion. While there is some component of subjectivity, there is no chance a single pixel would meet the legal requirement of a substantial change.
IMO, even changing one pixel counts as transforming the work. It seems like a fair mechanism to allow artists to recieve credit where its due for their original work, while at the same time allowing them to freely give their hard work back to the community.
To be blunt, for legal purposes, it doesn't matter what you think -- it matters what a judge and jury would think. Changing a single pixel is most definitely not a transformation of the original work, and OGA will not accept content submitted under the assumption that it is.
I understand your thought process. Computer programmers don't like gray areas, but the law isn't a computer program. It's all about interpretation, and there are gray areas all over the place. The key to operating safely is avoiding those gray areas.
I'd be happy to entertain a discussion about what copyright law ought to be (on the forum or in IRC -- it's kind of off topic here), but for the purpos of art submissions, we have to consider what copyright law is.