[Clipart] OpenPhoto project.

[Jon Phillips]

You guys should forward some of these comments to the openphoto ppl.

Jon


On Sat, 2004-08-21 at 20:29, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> 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.
-- 
Jon Phillips

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jon at rejon.org
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