Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ JPB ] on Sunday 04 June 2006 10:16 \__
>
>> Fantastic achievement, of course.
>
>
> Yes, it was said to be a great success and many DVD were sold, with plans
> to do further work, maybe even a sequel.
>
> http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/25/1513215&from=rss
>
> Here is a decent quality (for Flash) teaser:
>
> http://youtube.com/watch?v=O5u8Iha_WSE&search=elephant%20dream
>
>
>> There's one thing I see which concerns me, to see something like this
>> produced as an Open movie, rather than a Copyleft movie. The selected
>> Creative Commons license does not include the "non-commercial" constraint
>> (Yay - good call) but also omits the "share-alike" constraint (Boo - poor
>> choice).
>
>
> I have always wondered about that. The effect of derivatives and re-use
> would open the door to all sorts of oddities and perhaps discourage some
> artists. However, large companies have this advantage already:
>
> http://www.prodisney.ru/clones.php
>
Almost all the "Elephants Dream" material is under a license that allows
derivatives, anyway, and there seems to be every encouragement from the
original creators for the production of derivations.
No less than with our software, derivatives add artistic value to aesthetic
works such as this, and I would certainly regard the permission of
derivative works as being a positive *advantage* and not a *dis*advantage.
The only type of work where I wonder about using an ND/no-derivatives
license is for opinion pieces, such as the political commentary that I
write from time to time. However, even there I'm not sure about the wisdom
of using a no-derivatives verbatim-only license, for a few reasons:
* I don't actually want to limit someone else from performing a "verbatim"
translation into another language or medium, provided that the intent of
the original piece is preserved without distortion
* I'd prefer to use the "attribution" clause intelligently enough to ensure
that if a derivative was used to distort the intent, that it at least
remains clear that it's not only my original work and ideally that the
changes are also clearly attributed.
* If a work like that is going to be maliciously distorted, then I've got a
feeling it will be done anyway, irrespective of the license. Parodies, for
example, would be covered by fair-use irrespective of license I think, and
licensing and laws are sometimes just ignored anyway.
By and large, therefore, I generally prefer to omit no-derivatives terms
from licensing for creative works, as in practice I find we're better off
permitting derivatives anyway, but with attribution of original and
subsequent contributors enforced. And you might find share-alike is a
necessary condition to fully achieve that, else I don't see what would
prevent correctly attributing the original authors but releasing an
anonymously modified derivative?
>> The problem is that is not that anyone can take the work, and
>> redistribute it or produce derivatives (commercially or otherwise), as
>> that was the intention, but that (subject to attribution, only) such a
>> derivative work could be subjected to the full force of today's copyright
>> and/or Digital Restrictions, and locked away from subsequent
>> re-distribution, re-mixing, and re-use.
>>
>> This has happened with computer software, as I need not say in C.O.L.A,
>> and is the reason for inventing Copyleft - what would prevent it in this
>> case, should "Elephants Dream" become successful and popular enough for a
>> commercial organisation to do that to it?
>
>
> It depends on the licences, I guess. A commercial organisation would
> probably be forced to publish the code which renders the film in its
> entirety. I see no harm in that.
How will they be forced? If they take the characters, textures, animations,
and everything else, and expand it into a full-length feature, what is to
prevent them from:
* quoting the correct attribution as specified by the original Creative
Commons license
* making available the full source and everything else for the original
short film, as originally licensed (they might get away with just referring
back to the original creators, but they're surely covered if they also
offer it)
* restricting access to the expanded feature, both the distributed final
result, and the (enhanced) source material for that, using the full force
of today's copyright law combined with technological DRM
What would prevent this? Even the original creators would not have access to
the enhanced work, not without negotiating and probably paying for specific
licensing from the downstream authors!
> Anyone would then be able to tweak or
> rerelease the film from the commercial organisation (yes, for free), so
> there would be little or no incentive to them. OpenSUSE and Fedora
> illustrate this point.
>
Fedora and OpenSuse are dealing with creations licensed under the GPL, which
is a copyleft license and ensures the freedoms we are discussing are
preserved. Perhaps rather than those, however, a better example is what
CentOS are able to do, providing a 100% compatible rebuild of Red Hat - yet
downstream providers could of course do the same thing to CentOS (or Red
Hat!), and also Red Hat are equally free to access and build in anything
the downstream people do which is good and useful.
Without copyleft (and for Creative Commons, share-alike terms) then the
freedoms to tweak and/or re-release derivations is not guaranteed to be
preserved at all as far as I can see.
--
JPB
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