PDA

View Full Version : Understanding Licensing


ryanhaigh
March 5th, 2008, 08:57 PM
I am trying to collect some images which I intend to distribute. I have been looking at the creative commons groups images on flickr and some of them are quite nice but I have very little understanding of licensing in general so here are some questions:

What would be necessary for attribution, the license says the creators conditions should be met but I have not seen any conditions during my quick search.

If I resized the images to be a standard 1024x768 or something similar would that be classified as a derivative work.

If the user decided to use the images would they then have to have attribution to the original author. What if for example the person created a collage using the images and decided to put it up on flickr, would they need attribution for all the images, would shrinking and combining/tiling images be derivative works?

Could ubuntu provide a package containing such images, would this be commercial use?

On another issue, I have written some software as part of my thesis. It uses python, python-alsasudio, pyserial and other modules available in ubuntu-repos. This software runs on a minimal ubuntu based install on a product which will be available commercially. No changes to the souces of the python modules or ubuntu software have been made. Can someone tell me what measures need to be taken regarding licensing for such a project so that I may inform the sponsor? I don't know if they want to restrict the license I release the code I have written under, if not it will be my first GPL project :)

Apologies if the answers to these questions are obvious, unfortunately to me they are not, this post will hopefully help to remedy that situation.

ryanhaigh
March 6th, 2008, 12:16 PM
I've just been reading about public domain images, I'm going to start collecting some of these for my project, but I would still like to know about the questions I posted, some of the CC images are really nice and I would like to be able to use them as well.

ryanhaigh
March 10th, 2008, 10:25 PM
If somone could even just point me to a page with information on what ubuntu allows in the repos that would be great.

King_Critter
March 11th, 2008, 01:25 AM
Well, as you've probably noticed, licenses are tricky things. :P

Regarding Creative Commons, you can read a description of the different versions here (http://creativecommons.org/about/license/), at CC's website.

If you created a collage, I believe that you would have to credit everyone, and you could only do that in the first place if the pictures were under a share-alike CC license. A derivative work would be if you re-drew a picture, for example.

What's allowed in the Ubuntu repositories, I have no clue. I think demanding attribution is incompatible with the GPL, so they'd probably have to be in the Universe(?) repository.

But anyways, everything I just said may not be completely accurate. It's not like I just pulled it out of my ***, but I'm definitely no law student. I hope I gave you enough information to get you started, though.

Good luck! ^_^