Freedom, Freedom

A file once meant a stack of paper. Technology can now move a digitised version of those documents to the other side of the world in around one second, at little cost, and simply copying a file is easy. But copying a file is not simple, in the legal context.

What is said about freedom in this chapter relates to the reuse of text and image files, in whole or in part. International copyright, in strong contrast to the technical side of reuse, is far from being straightforward.

Lunyr content is released without restriction on reuse. The major point made in this chapter is that this intention, to provide free content, can only be fulfilled by a scrutiny of how any reused content in it is sourced. The legal complexities have to be built into the workflow, to get it right.

The sections in this chapter are:

• Creative Commons licenses
• Tables of licenses
• Share-alike and "markdown"
• Why this matters for Lunyr

Creative Commons licenses

Above here was once an image of Catelyn Stark, about whom we talked in Chapter 6. It was taken from Flickr.

On the Flickr site, it is possible to search within images that are posted under a given Creative Commons license. The metadata on the page from which this image was taken stated that it is under an "attribution" license. So the image appeared here, with an attribution to the person posting it on Flickr. But the fact that the image was then taken down indicates something serious: it is actually not so easy to understand which images online are "free" for reuse. And if they are free in that sense, what conditions still need to be met.

The images of Catelyn on the Wikia page mentioned in Chapter 6 can be researched there, and those images are much more restricted in terms of reuse. Typically they are copyright images, in which case they are used on Wikia with the permission of the rights holder. There is no reason to believe that they can be reused legally, by others.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which apply to text as well as images, are now standard on the Web. Knowing the basics about them is a good first step in understanding how to work within intellectual property restrictions on online material. Flickr has infrastructure to help you search within useful classes of CC-licensed content.

Tables of licenses

There are seven Creative Commons licenses used by Flickr to classify images. We divide them into two groups. The links provided can be found on Flickr's Creative Commons page.

These four licenses have serious restrictions. A "non-commercial" license means the image cannot be used by any kind of business. A "no-derivatives" license restricts usage to the image as is (so, for example, not cropped). While these four licenses are popular with uploaders, and allow what could be called hobby uses, they aren't designed for large-scale projects designed to allow reuse.

These three licenses are in a much more obvious sense free, and the good news is that Flickr hosts around 100 million images under them.

Wikimedia Commons, smaller but more tightly organized, mostly uses versions of just these three licenses. It is another basic resource for images, and other media files.

Wikimedia Commons and Wikia share the same underlying software platform, MediaWiki. Each image gets an "image description" page. There you can find the licensing and other metadata on the image. The difference with Wikia, as was mentioned before, is that non-free licenses for images are common there. Wikia text is another matter: you can read about it here. You do need to bear in mind that text and images may need to be treated differently, for reuse.

Share-alike and "markdown"

What on earth is the difference between "Attribution-ShareAlike" and "Attribution"? This turns out to be a big deal.

You'll see the abbreviations CC-by-SA for Attribution-ShareAlike, CC-by for Attribution. "Attribution" means the file can be reused, but only with a statement about its origins, as was done above. In practice, a link to the place from which it was downloaded may be counted sufficient.

"Share-alike" is a virality condition, in other words a condition that persists through reuse. It says that derivative works may not be placed under the more restricted licenses above. For more details, do a search for the term.

It is not legally possible to use a "markdown" to transform a CC-by-SA license into CC0: the original copyright is given under condition that this transformation is not applicable, however far down a chain of reuse we are. Markdown, to explain, is the common term for removing unwanted format from text, for example by pasting it in plain text. The Share-alike license means laundering the license by reuse doesn't happen.

The important difference with CC-by is the language missing. Where CC-by-SA requires this (source):

If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work 
only under the same or similar license to this one.

there is no such language for CC-by. Therefore, if you make your own version or mashup with it, that version must have attribution. But you can decide yourself that your version is CC0. That much "markdown" is legal. And, from the point of view of what you can find on Flickr, CC-by is much more common than CC0.

Why this matters for Lunyr, and reused text and images from it

Lunyr aims to release content that can be reused freely. In the Creative Commons perspective, it intends a CC-by-SA license. That license type, CC-by-SA, means more restriction than "public domain" from the point of US law, which counts as CC0 There are implications for Lunyr's workflows, and for anyone who wants to be a downstream user of Lunyr content.

Much open-licensed online text is under a CC-by-SA license. To make it into CC0 text, you'd have to make sure that it is paraphrased, not just copied. That content of the paraphrase should be purely factual, rather than containing editorial comment and opinion that is not attributed to anyone. That's because plain factual content does not attract copyright. Here is where Chapter 5 matters: it covers the techniques for doing a factual abstract. Otherwise reuse has to carry along conditions.

When it comes to images, what licenses say about derivative works also has to be taken into account. Cropped CC-by-SA and CC-by images can be used on Lunyr, with attribution. In the case of CC-by images in new versions, that content can then be released CC0.