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This page contains a single entry by Rob Myers published on January 1, 2010 9:12 PM.
Processing Code Community Site Licencing was the previous entry in this blog.
Notes Toward Free Culture is the next entry in this blog.
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(a comment on the "Processing Code Community Site Licensing" article)
Hi Rob,
I'm one of the authors of sketchPatch, your article made me consider whether we should switch to a better licenses for the code than the CC we use.
I read more about the MIT license, and it appeals a lot to me, as it's very short and even more liberal than the CC we used.
I even found a shorter one, the ISC license.
I have two questions: What do you think of the ISC license? What if we modify the ISC license to have it cover the generated imagery as well, would that be "good practice"?
Thanks,
Davide
Yes if you wish to stay with permissive licencing for the code (I can't interest you in copyleft I take it? ;-) ) then a licence that has been written with software in mind would be good.
1. The FSF licence list page says that the ISC licence isn't recommended because it contains language similar to some that was problematic in another licence. The Expat or OpenBSD licences are recommended instead -
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ISC
2. Do you mean that the licence could cover the output if people wanted it to, or that it would cover the output as a condition of using the site? Output isn't generally covered by the software's licence even for copyleft software -
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput
If the output includes work under a copyleft licence (e.g. a CC-BY-SA background image) it must be published under that licence.
But otherwise the user holds copyright on the output that they have caused to be generated and they are free to licence that output as they wish. You could require that people licence images uploaded to your site or the blog under the modified licence, but it would probably be better to require CC-BY on any uploaded images because software licences aren't a good match for generated images; they don't cover (e.g.) moral rights or public exhibition for example.
I understand that generative art/art computing and web design are where the wall between code and images starts to break down, and a single licence for art and code would help here, but use of software and performance of art are different enough that this would be very difficult to get right in my opinion.
...
For an expert opinion I recommend talking to CC about this. Fred Benenson (@mecredis on Twitter) helped OpenProcessing but he's left CC now, so ping Mike Linksveyer (ml@creativecommons.org) and he'll know what to do.
Or do ask for any more information or clarification on what I've said here.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. ;-)