Re: photo licenses
Maarten de Boer <mdeboer@iua.upf.edu> writes:
> I am not sure about the license to use for the photos I made myself,
> and I am not sure which licenses are acceptable for photos I found
> elsewhere, or that people want to provide me with.
>
> I realize that there has been a lot of talk about this already,
> but I did not find a definitive answer...
There probably isn't one. The DFSG discusses the "source" of a work;
it's not clear how that applies to photographic images.
If you want to allow just about any use of the work, while still
retaining copyright, you can distribute your work under the Expat
license.
<URL:http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt>
> I placed my own photos under CC 1.0, but I understand that this
> is not acceptable?
"CC 1.0" isn't a license. Creative Commons confuses the issue by
making many different licenses possible; a copyright holder can pick
and choose from several different terms to come up with a license
text. This, of course, leads to the ambiguity we face here.
I believe the spirit of the "NC" and "ND" clauses of the CC license
options are trivially non-free by the DFSG.
I believe that there are also problems with the wording of any of the
current revisions of all CC license texts, and so many people regard
all CC licenses currently available to be non-free under the
DFSG. People within Creative Commons are aware of these issues, and
AFAIK there are ongoing efforts to address them in a future revision.
> I can change them under the GPL, but would that oblige me to give
> access to the original jpegs as downloaded from my camera (before
> rescaling, etc), as this would be considered the "source"?
The GPL's definition of "source" is clear, but leaves the term
"preferred form for making modifications to [the work]" undefined
(deliberately, I believe). For this reason, where it's not clear even
to *you* what this term means, it may be best to avoid the GPL for
these kinds of works and choose a free license that is not a copyleft.
> The first is public domain, with a rather explicit note of the other.
> Would this be considered debian-compatible?
Works that Debian can redistribute from the public domain are
DFSG-free. Whether a work truly is available in the public domain is
sometimes surprisingly difficult to determine.
> And the second is DGPL 1.2, which I understand is not acceptable?
I don't know of a DGPL. What license do you mean?
--
\ "I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at |
`\ the rate of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ..." -- F. H. Wales, |
_o__) 1936 |
Ben Finney
Reply to: