[FM Discuss] Final Image Licensing for "E-Book Enlightenment"

[adam]

hey,

Good work on the cover. Looks good :)

as for the license issues....weeeeeell.....im sorry if I may appear
overly 'whatever' with regard to this question - its only because i dont
believe in copyright even though i know it exists, and i also dont think
there is any such thing as a 'free license' since none of them make
content 'free' they all act as jails for content in various ways.

so...with that apology aside. i will try to answer your points in some
way which I hope meets your needs.


> 
> 1. Can the images used on the cover have a different license than the 
> interior illustrations (let's say GPLII for the cover to support the 
> precedent at FLOSS Manuals, and perhaps Creative Commons cc by-nc-sa and 
> cc by-nc-nd on the interior)? We thought it might be interesting to link 
> to CC licenses within the text on the FM site if it is agreeable with 
> the author and the FM team.
> 

so, NC is not free. and thats a bit of an ideological problem. Is there
really someone on your team that needs this NC? its really a horrible
license requirement and exists, in my opinion, only so that people who
dont understand what free is (ie. publishers) to feel like they are
being cool and free, when they arent. BY-SA, BY, or CC-O is better if
you want to use CC licenses. NC is a 'feel good' requirement which is
just smoke and mirrors.

On the topic of CC - if its a show stopper for you to use GPL then by
all means use CC, however if you do this the content cannot be used by
any other existing manuals _including_ the current OLPC manuals which
are all GPL. I would prefer, if you want to go down this road, to dual
license with the GPL. That legally doesnt help actually, but we can at
least fudge it a bit and pretend we dont know the legal ramifications of
dual licensing material while copying the content 'in good faith'.

> 2. Can the images be released as GPLII for the 72dpi/600px versions used 
> by FLOSS Manuals, yet something different for the full resolution 
> versions? What if the artist wanted to make a poster or something along 
> those lines with the full resolution images?
> 

technically this is problematic, as in we dont have a technical way to
manage this. So I would have to say no we cant do it. But maybe i dont
get your point - I dont understand why you need the license to be
different inorder to make a poster from it...maybe you can explain that
a bit more.

> 3. Will Booki support per-object licensing in the future, or will the 
> license always apply to the entire book?
> 

well...you have to remember that per-object licensing is a nightmare.
That introduces all sorts of crazy scenarios - what objects can fit with
what objects? Ugh...I dont ever want to go down that path. Even dealing
with this on a per-chapter basis is pretty crazy and soon becomes
non-sensical and totally unmanageable.

sorry, i dont mean to dismiss your question, i just cant see how we can
make this work and i really dont want to even think about it.

our dev principles and our usability principles have been 'keep it
simple'. to do this we have to throw away a whole lot of complicated
problems and reduce them to a pragmatic working environment. hence we
license on a per-book basis. there might be some scope at a later date
to introduce per-chapter licensing but that is about as granular as i
would ever hope we would go. 

on the other hand, what i would like to see in Booki is a nice way to
request that content be relicensed. Perhaps by clicking on the credits
list for a chapter and then a 'can i relicense this please' message gets
sent to the rights holder who can then reply personally or have
automated instant replies to specific requests (ie relicensing to
specific licences would auto respond with a 'yes' or 'no) 

but thats another story...(although not entirely unrelated)

> Many of these questions are raised out of the course of our internal 
> collaborative process (for instance, the artist has created images that 
> the book designer may not use, but we are still contemplating releasing 
> them through our RDC site).
> 
> Rest assured, we have no shortage of creativity or curiosity at #rdcHQ! 
>   :-)
> 

ok. I would hope you could communicate to everyone that their content is
important to others - let the world have access to it, and dont get too
caught up in license issues. Its not the point and it just stops good
content from getting to the people that want it...

sorry again, i just cant take copyright and its ridiculous consequences
seriously....I hope you can convince your team to ease up a little on
the license issue and just go with what we currently use. keeping it
like this or dual licensing with CC would be the easiest way for all to
go

adam



> Thank you!
> 
> Rebecca Malamud
> ---------------------------------------
> http://ruraldesigncollective.org 
> (KICKSTARTER funded as of 08/19 - YES!)
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