[PD-ot] Art: To GPL or not to GPL?

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Tuesday, Dec 16, 2003, at 13:24 Europe/Brussels, Frank Barknecht  
wrote:

> Hallo,
> Hans-Christoph Steiner hat gesagt: // Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>> My one issue is how to prevent unscrupulous use of work that is
>> released freely.
>
> You know this: The catch in the GPL to prevent unscrupulous use is,
> that all derived works have to be GPL again (the "Share Alike" in some
> CC licenses). So even if someone takes your work and builds upon it
> (which is something you probably want to encourage), it will flow back
> into the free code or art world.
>
> If you want attribution as well, there are ways to ensure this,
> in the CC Attribution license this is made very clear, but I guess,
> this is possible with GPL'd work as well.

No, the GPL specifically does not have an attribution clause because of  
the problems that such a clause caused with the BSD license.  RMS is in  
fact opposed to attribution clauses, and I agree totally for software  
projects.  For software, attribution clauses give a minor benefit to  
the authors, but with major problems.  Imagine if RedHat had to give  
credit in all of their materials (books, software boxes, ads, etc.) to  
every person who has contributed to RedHat GNU/Linux? It would be  
totally unmanagable.  Also, if they left someone out, they could be  
sued for damages.

But with parts of art projects that are not 'tools' (i.e. the score,  
etc.), the reasons for attribution clauses might be compelling enough  
to warrant their use.  But you could take the example of music built  
with samples to be a similar case as with RedHat.  Looking say 20 years  
into the future, where art is made from samples of samples of  
samples..., then the attribution list is going to be in the thousands,  
if not more.  This is the problem with attribution clauses that makes  
them almost as bad as regular copyrights in the long run; you would  
have to spend so much time/money to make sure you are giving all of the  
correct attributions.

I bring up this issue because I want to expand the idea of copyleft as  
far as it can go.  I believe that is a much better model that what  
exists today.   I just want to try to make a living doing the work that  
I am inspired to do.  Hopefully these two things can coexist.

.hc

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