The Tell-Tale R

I completely understand the logic of the No-Deriv license. As someone who regularly produces things, it’s no stretch to relate to content creators who view their work as a majestic, holistic symphony; a single element out of place, and the whole thing is ruined.

I can also understand how that protective instinct can be tempered by the desire to share and contribute your work to the Commons. After all, what good is a sensationally-well framed image if it just sits on your Smugmug account under a watermark, not being viewed by anyone.

What I don’t understand is how you can release your work under a strictly interpreted No-Derivs license online. It’s not that I think users are incapable of respecting the artist’s wishes—many on Flickr go to great lengths to ensure that artists are OK with the specific reuse of their image, and satisfied with the attribution. It’s that I think the nominally “perfect” digital copy of a work will invariably be turned into a derivative work as it is presented in human-readable form.

Take the cheap monitor I’m viewing this on right now—it has a horrific blue tint that, if photoshopped and reposted online, would elicit an angry response from any No-Deriv rights-holder. Or consider a poorly-coded website, whose CSS only makes visible a small portion of larger images. The whole image is still being loaded and displayed in full, but what’s visible to the user is a de facto crop.

Sure, you could get philosophical an argue that any copy is a derivative work, or state that on a long enough time scale, the only applicable license to any human creation is is CC-zero. But for those of us living in the here and now, I sincerely recommend rethinking your interpretation of exactly what “No-Derivs” means.

Many a braincell has been burned arguing whether or not cropping and resizing constitute derivative works. My assertion is that some alterations are inevitable side-effects of creating digital works, and that content creators would better serve themselves, their works, and the Commons by taking up a similarly lax interpretation of “No-Derivs”.