[Clipart] OpenPhoto project.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.com> writes:

> Clipart is a category where *any* licensing is a bad thing.  Clipart
> is all about clipping and reusing in lots of different ways.
> Licenses just gets in the way.

Right, this is something inherent in the nature of what clipart is,
and what it's normally used for.

> Software is a different story.  

Agreed.  For software, the restrictions of e.g. the BSD license do not
in practice cause anybody any trouble, and there are niches for more
restrictive licenses of various types (GPL, non-commercial licenses
(such as D1X or the Ken Lowe diplomacy adjudicators, which reasons
could not exist under a BSD or GPL-type license), proprietary licenses
(freeware, shareware, commercial...), and so on and so forth.)

> For photos, the rules may be quite different.  Where it's rare to
> see a piece of clipart *with* its author's name, it's quite common
> to see photos with their photographer's name.  In a way, for some
> photos, having the photographer's name actually *enhances* the
> photo.

Sometimes photos can be used as clipart, if they're cropped and scaled
with suitable care, but this is not the primary use of photos, and for
most of the things photos are used for, requiring attribution is
really not a problem, IMO.  It does limit their usefulnes as clipart
and for certain other special purposes, but these are not their
primary or intended uses.

> So I don't think we should automatically apply philosophies we've
> worked out for clipart to this other project.

No, they're not trying to make a clipart library.  They're making a
photo gallery or something, and that's rather different.

> This license may work very well for them.  Personally, I would have
> liked to see them adopt a more commonly used license such as GPL or
> whatever, 

I don't understand what the benefit would be of using the GPL for
photographs.  That doesn't make sense to me.  Photographs don't have
source code, for one thing, and the GPL's wording is heavily geared
toward works with source code.  For another thing, it is not usual to
redistribute modified versions of photographs (except embedded in a
larger work, and even then the modifications are normally limited to
what is necessary to fit the photo within the constraints of the
larger work), and redistributing modifications is what the GPL is
largely all about.

For photographs, I would think you'd want a license that touches
points such as what attribution is required, what redistribution is
allowed, and what types of works the photographs are allowed to be
embedded in.  You probably would want a clause or two about nontrivial
modifications to the photographs (what's allowed and what's not;
obviously insofar as you allow use of the photos you'd allow them to
be used in a cropped or scaled form or with colorspace reductions,
faded, with blurred edges, and that sort of thing; whether you would
allow more substantial changes like superimposing one photo over
another and painting in stuff that wasn't there is what you'd want to
delineate), but I would think that most of the license would be about
other stuff.

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